


Army of Ghosts

by Escalus



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Crimes & Criminals, Dark Stiles, F/M, Future Fic, Murder, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-07-27 14:29:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 42,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7622242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escalus/pseuds/Escalus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Whaddya know about that,” Stiles remarked sarcastically to the army of ghosts that pressed all around him, threatening to steal all the light and air from the room, “I <i>am</i> the bad guy.”</p>
<p>A terrible and senseless crime, piled on top of everything else in his life, leads Stiles down a path to a dark end.   Sometimes, to make things right, you have to get your hands a little dirty.   And sometimes, you have to get them a lot dirty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after Season 5. Season 6 will most likely change everything, which is why I labeled it an alternate universe.

**August 2, 2013:**

It was the height of summer, and it was so very, very hot. The clock had just crept past eight and Stiles was already beginning to feel a little sticky. He drank his ice coffee, but it didn't stop him from beginning to whine. The heat wasn’t the only reason for his discomfort. The summer was rushing past at light speed, and by the end of the month he would be off to college at Irvine. He really was excited to start but he had never truly overcome his anxiety at leaving his friends and family. “Awwwwwwwww, c’mon, Scottie. Come with us.”

Scott shook his head with a laugh. “You know I can’t. I’ve got to get down to school; I’ve got a meeting with my adviser and Financial Aid. They take probationary admission pretty seriously, and I’m not going to do anything to mess it up. You guys have fun.”

Lydia looked amused over her sunglasses and iced mocha. “At least one of you is responsible.” She teased Stiles all the time now in the best possible ways. 

“I’m responsible. I’m totally responsible.” He protested loudly and gestured around the coffee shop. “Everyone in here can tell I’m responsible.” He indicated the waitress, the old lady with the knitting, and the pair of dudebros in the corner. “Scott, I just don’t want to be trapped in a car with Lydia alone all day and run out of clever things to say.” 

Scott gave him a disbelieving look. “You think you might run out of things to say.”

Lydia snorted. “Tell Scott goodbye and come on.” She stands up and kissed Scott on the cheek. 

“When will you be back?” Stiles demanded. “After a day of girl stuff, I’m going to need quality male bonding time.” 

“I’ll be there until six at the latest, and it’s a straight shot back up the highway. So, I should be free around eight? Come earlier if you want dinner.” 

Stiles grinned. “Absolutely. I’m going to miss your mom’s cooking. Sniff you later, jerk.” 

&&&&&&

Stiles leaned his head against the window as they headed back toward Beacon Hills from San Francisco. The day had been very nearly perfect. Lydia and he hadn’t had a set agenda; they let the day come as it wished. There was a little shopping and a little sightseeing. He had complained about the heat and she had made snarky remarks about his infantile behavior, but they both knew now that it was comfortable banter, as old and as familiar as the names they wore. They had held hands as they walked downtown beneath the skyscrapers. It had been a great day.

“I can drive, you know, if you’re tired.” Stiles offered. “I’ve not wrecked the jeep since last fall.”

“Yeah, but no.” Lydia stuck her tongue out at him. “I like this car; nothing is going to happen to it. But it looks like we might have to stop and get something to eat, anyway. We’ll be lucky to get home by eight.” 

He was too content to be upset. “You wanna come over too?” 

“And watch you two boys play Call of Duty badly? No thank you. I need some me-time.” 

Stiles put on a fake pout. “College is going to start soon. We won’t see each other as much.”

“It's a seven-hour drive between Stanford and Irvine. We'll see each other twice a month and on holidays. We'll Skype, text, and phone. It’s the 21st century, Stiles after all.” She dropped the insincere scorn and continued seriously. “Don’t worry about it. We’re not going to lose each other now.”

He smiled back at her and turned to watch the side of the road passing by. 

Nearly fifteen minutes later, he noticed that the car was accelerating; Lydia was driving really fast. Glancing over at the speedometer, he said: “Lydia, you’re going ninety.” She did not answer him and she did not slow down. _Crap_ , he thought. She continued to press on the gas, the car gaining more and more speed. While she still had control, she was not paying attention to how fast she was going, urgency locked in her eyes. 

“Lydia, slow down!” He tried to shake her out or her trance. They were now breaking 100 mph. “Lydia, come on, this is dangerous. Slow down! Slow down!” Finally, he shook her roughly and yelled, “LYDIA, STOP!” 

With a whimper, Lydia pulled her foot off the gas and the car began to slow due to friction. She didn’t hit the brake to stop the car, so soon they were going slower than the limit. Cars zipped past, honking at them in irritation, but she did not pay them any mind. She pulled onto the shoulder as the car began to idle, while Stiles looked at her with fear and anxiety in equal measure. 

She didn’t scream until the car had come to a complete stop.

&&&&&&

Stiles drove the rest of the way to Beacon Hills. He had his phone out on the seat next to him, but no one had called. Every attempt to get Lydia to talk about what she had heard was refused. All she did was close her eyes and keep her face to the window. She would not speak, her face pale and her eyes glassy when she bothered to open them. He gave up after a while; he did not want to force her to talk, and he doubted he could anyway. 

As he considered what to do next, his phone buzzed so loudly to his ears that he jumped and the car swerved onto the shoulder. The number indicated it was Mason; his stomach churned in anticipation. 

The junior was frantic. “Stiles, thank God! Can you come to the lake in the Preserve? We need your help.”

His heart stopped beating for a moment. “What’s wrong? Is anyone ... hurt?” A quick glance showed that Lydia was not responding to his side of the phone conversation.

“We were swimming and suddenly Liam roared at us and ran off. We tried to follow him, but he won’t let anyone get near him. We can’t even get close, and we don’t know what to do!” 

“Did you call Scott?” He swerved the car to the right hard to get on the correct road toward the Preserve. He knew that lake. He’d gone swimming in it with the pack last summer. 

“He’s not picking up.”

“We’ll be there soon. He’s probably still on the bike coming back from school. Keep trying.” He wondered what was up with their little furious puppy. Liam was getting better at controlling the dangerous mixture of his own anger and the supernatural rage he now possessed, but he still had the occasional outburst. He glanced over at Lydia, but she just shook her head and offered no insight.

It wasn’t hard to find Mason’s car at the lake. It must have been a couple’s trip, because Mason, Cory, and Hayden were all standing at the edge of the water in the twilight. None of them seem to be hurt, but they all seemed upset – Hayden most of all. This wasn’t a surprise, as Hayden was not only Liam’s girlfriend but also the only other werewolf there. She had probably sensed Liam’s distress the most thoroughly.

“I swear,” Stiles said, going for humor, “we can’t leave you kids alone for one day without you getting into trouble.” He was actually sweating and it had nothing to do with heat. Lydia still hadn’t said a single word to him since her scream. “Where did you see him last?”

“I followed him down to the hollow of Miller’s Outflow after he told us not to,” admitted Corey, because invisibility certainly had its uses. One of these days they were going to have to figure out from what exactly the chimera had been cooked up. “He started smashing trees so I came back.” 

“Good job.” Stiles sometimes wished he had the common sense Corey always exhibited. “Good job. I’m going to go talk to him. He told you to stay away, not me.” With a wave, he began to work his way around the edge of the lake towards Miller’s Outflow. It wasn’t a big lake; Stiles argued with himself that it could actually be a pond, but then he didn’t have an actual measurement of the area of the lake and why was he thinking of that right now? He kept looking back at the others sitting on the shore. At this distance they were just indistinct figures. He would get Liam to calm down, and then they’d wait for Scott before figuring out what to do next. 

Of course, Liam would pick the part of the lake shore that was the farthest from where the cars were parked, and it was hot even though the sun was setting and oh, God, the mosquitoes. “Frickin’ werewolves,” he muttered. When he got to the outflow, he saw the younger teen kneeling by a fallen tree a little way into the woods, head bent over the stream.

“Heyyyyyy, buddy.” One of these days, Stiles was going to have to stop treating Liam like he was a child. Truth be told, Scott’s first beta had matured a lot in the time he had known him. Stiles really thought of him like a little brother, which was really cool, not that he would ever say that to anyone else. “What’s the matter? You’ve got everyone worried.”

Liam made an effort to turn and look at him; his voice was marred by a persistent growl. “I don’t know. I don’t know why this happened.” He had transformed more than he ever had before, beyond the beta form, and his eyes were red. Alpha red. 

Stiles’ face screwed up in an expression of stunned disbelief. This was impossible – well, not impossible, but totally, ridiculously improbable. There were only three ways to become an alpha: become a True Alpha (highly unlikely at a late-summer swim party), kill an Alpha, or . . . 

Stiles whipped his head around to look back across the lake. He could just barely make out the others. He saw the three younger ones working together to look out for Liam, and he also saw a single figure, Lydia, staring across the lake directly at him. She knew. She had to have known. 

&&&&&&

Stiles burst into the sheriff’s station, slamming doors and shouting like a bomb had gone off. Lydia had given him her car keys with the first words she had spoken since the scream: “Find your father.” He didn’t remember how he had driven to the station; he didn’t even remember what he had said to calm Liam down or even if he had calmed Liam down. At a certain point, his own mind had just turned off about anything but fulfilling Lydia’s command.

The deputy on duty at the front desk was seemingly waiting for him, telling him to head straight to his Dad’s office. Only Parrish met him before his father’s door and surprised him by taking his arm in a painfully tight grip. “Be careful. You need to accept what has happened.“ His eyes glowed with the hellhound’s fire for just a moment and then Parrish was back, looking vaguely shocked and confused at what he had just said. 

Stiles could care less; his heart was beating wildly and his hands were slick with sweat. “What I need is for you to get the fuck out of my way.” It was the only reply he could think of. He sidestepped the deputy and pushed open the door to his office. His father was there, looking more tired and sad than usual. The look on his face did not get any better when he saw his son enter; his father drew himself up as if to brace himself for the conversation.

“How did you know?” The sheriff asked, rubbing at the back of his neck. Of course, he’d be at a loss for words. What do you say now?

“Liam. He’s the alpha now. Why didn’t you call me?” He was shaking; he had wanted to scream the question, make it an accusation, but he didn’t. He didn’t do anything.

“Stiles, there wasn’t anything you could do. When we got the call, it was over. It’s a murder investigation now.” The sheriff was trying to be calming, rational.

“I want to see him.” Stiles was insistent. He had to see it for himself.

The sheriff paused for a moment and then he gritted out. “No, Stiles, you don’t want to see him. You need to calm down; go home. It’s not going to get any easier from here on out.” 

“No, I want to see him. I need to see him. Dad, you don’t know. He’s come back from it before.” 

“No, Stiles. You really don’t want to see him.“ There was a desperate edge to his voice, but Stiles wouldn’t let himself hear it. 

“Dad, I have to!“ His voice was rising and breaking at the same time as he tried to talk over his own father and his own fear.

“No!” The sheriff’s tone was forceful and final. He stepped up and then hugged his son, bringing his mouth close to his ear. “Stiles, they cut him up. You don’t want to see that. Go home.”

More awful weight hit him in the gut then. For once, he didn’t argue with his father. He stumbled on his way out of the office. 

Parrish was still waiting for him. At first, the deputy looked like he wanted to offer his condolence, but before he could, once again there was fire in his eyes and a low growl of warning. The deputy even followed him out of the station, watching him. When Stiles tuned back to confront him, angrily, the look vanished and the human standing there looked like he didn’t understand what he was doing.

Stiles did not understand either, so he didn’t make a scene. He didn’t want to understand.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles sat there and then said, quietly. “What do you think I can do?”
> 
> “Lie to him. You're really good at lying.” Malia wasn’t accusing him or attacking him; she was saying what she thought was the truth. “Tell him that if he works really hard and gets better at all this, that he’ll be able to stop people like those assholes from killing him or Mason or his parents. Tell him that if he is a great alpha, he can help everyone and it doesn’t have to end in death and funerals. Tell him if he goes home and finishes school, you guarantee he’ll live fifty years and have a dozen babies with Hayden. Lie to him because you want him to be happy.”

**August 3, 2013:**

He did not want to eat. He did not want to sleep. He did not want to think. He did not talk to anyone. He did not respond to phone calls, to texts, to people knocking on the door. He was just a presence in the house, a ghost that any one could see.

But that didn’t work for long, for he was not the only ghost here; he could see them now. They pressed up against him. Some he had known for a long time; some he didn’t know at all. Some he knew so very well it made him ache. They were in his room, in his Dad’s bedroom, on the couch, in the kitchen. If he stayed in one place, he would have to talk to them, so he moved. He kept moving in a circuit around the house. He walked and walked and walked. 

Finally, when he could walk no more, he went into the spare bedroom. They didn’t use it for that any more. He and his father called it the ‘Not Evidence Room.’ All the recordings, all the statements, all the physical evidence that would point to the existence of the supernatural that he, his father, and his friends had covered up was kept in this room. His father had insisted, because as much as it galled the sheriff to have to tamper with evidence, it galled him even more to get rid of it. To his father, criminals were criminals, no matter what color their eyes glowed. His dad would cover it up to protect the innocent, but he refused to let their crimes vanish. 

Stiles sat down to continue sorting and arranging the evidence. He had worked out a system so that his dad could use it easily when he was finally away at school. He sniffed and then threw any thought of the future out his head. It was time he focused on old monsters and their old crimes, caught on paper, film, and file; mostly he had to, so he could ignore the new monsters and their new crimes.

 

 **August 4, 2013:**

His father had news for him, but he used it to blackmail him into eating a proper meal. Stiles grumbled and picked at his food until he had satisfied the Sheriff’s need to see his son actually keep something down. “We caught them. They aren’t much older than you. Not local boys. I don’t even think they’re real hunters.” He observed; they had been really sloppy in the aftermath. Several times over the last two days, Stiles had wanted to shriek at his father for seeming to be so calm about this. Then he realized that his father must have dealt with cases like this before, and he had created methods to keep the horror from getting to him, even if it was someone he knew. Chris Argent had called it ‘compartmentalization.’

Stiles glowered at the ashes disguised as a meal. “They were real enough. I want to see the case file.”

The sheriff winced and frowned at the same time. “You know I can’t let you do that.”

“You can either control how I see it, or you can spend your time trying to figuring out how to stop me from seeing it. One of those choices takes less effort.”

The sheriff looked at him across the table, weighing the truth of that future, and sighed. “If you eat all of your dinner, I’ll let you see it. I’m also removing the crime scene photos. I mean it. That’s the deal.”

“Sure.” He forced himself to choke down the food. He had finished when his father came back in with the folder. 

His father tried to be reassuring. “I won’t let them get away with it.” 

Stiles nodded and then opened up the folder; at the very top of it was new pain. “Dad. I have to give a statement.” He said in a quiet voice so low that he thought he might have to repeat himself.

“What? Do you know them?” The older man craned his neck to see the mug shots were on top. 

“No. I know how they knew where to set their ambush.” The pictures were of the two dudebros at the coffee shop that morning. “I told them.” 

Then he threw up all over the kitchen floor.

As his father cleaned up the mess and then called the detectives on the case, Stiles read the rest of the case file. Actually, reading was not the right word. He forced his eyes to go word by word, line by line. He wondered if he was torturing himself. He wondered why he wanted to read it. But he knew _he knew_ he had to.

The ambush had been set up on the highway back from the local university. They parked their car on the side of the road and flagged the victim down as he drove by. _Of course he’d stop. Of course._ Stiles went back and forth between the written confession and the forensic evidence that had been gathered. What am I looking for? A loophole? An escape clause? Chuck Bell, a nineteen-year-old with a history of drug possession and assault, told investigators that they had explained to the victim that the car was a rental, and they didn’t know what was wrong with it, while Kaden Dudek, a twenty-year old with several minor weapons charges, asked to borrow the victim’s phone. When he closed his eyes, he could hear the easy-going _Sure, I’ll take a look._ He wouldn’t have known much, but that wouldn’t stop him from wanting to help. When the hood was opened, Dudek triggered a shaped-charge explosive device which sent shrapnel directly into the victim. The investigators assumed, given what they could reconstruct from the scene, that the blast would have killed the victim instantly – unless the victim was an Alpha werewolf – but afterwards Dudek and Bell took fire axes to the victim dismembering . . . 

Stiles couldn’t read any more, fighting off waves of nausea. If he was sick again, his father wouldn’t be able to stand it. He closed the folder. He stared at manila cover as if he could hypnotize himself into blindness and deafness. Ghosts sang through the house, louder and louder, and they pressed on his shoulders. 

His father came back. “Someone from the prosecutor’s office will talk to you tomorrow morning. Can you get there on your own?” He paused. “You can’t blame yourself.”

He nodded without enthusiasm. “I’m going to try to sleep.”

 

**August 6, 2013:**

He was sitting in the living room watching television. Actually, his eyes were pointed in the direction of the television, but he was not actually sure what show he was watching. There were people yelling at other people about baby daddies and dumping and all the sorts of things that were just not interesting enough to distract him from his own thoughts. Looking at the television did keep him from seeing the others standing in the room trying to get his attention.

Someone knocked on the door. He ignored it, as he had been ignoring all knocks on the door for the last few days. 

They knocked once more. He did not move off the couch, but then there was a groan and a loud snap as someone forced the front door open. He sighed. _Frickin’ werewolves._

Only, it was not a werewolf. It was Malia. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer. So I came in.”

“I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. That’s what it usually means when you knock on a door and people don’t answer it.”

“I know that, but I need to talk to you, so I broke the door. If it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t have done it.” She explained, as if that was all he needed to know. “And it is important.”

“What is it?” He was just so tired.

“You need to talk to Liam. He hasn’t been home since that day at the lake. The rest of us have been covering for him, but his parents are getting really upset. They know why he would be missing, but they want to see him at home. You have to get him to go home; you have to get him to change back.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Stiles, Liam’s been transformed ever since you told him what his eyes meant. And I don’t mean the beta form, I meant full alpha: big, tall, dark skin. I know why he’s doing this, but nothing I say to him makes any difference. He can’t go home like that; he can’t even be in town like that.”

Stiles rubbed his face with both hands. “Any idea why he’s doing this?”

“He’s scared, and when you’re scared being an animal is easier. You’re all scared. I’m scared, too, but I’m used to it.” She sounded exasperated about being sidetracked. 

“Used to it?”

“I know everybody thinks I’m weird or dumb or whatever, but I think you guys are pretty stupid, too. You lose someone and it hurts but then you all walk around as if this isn’t what is supposed to happen. But that is what's supposed to happen; that’s what life is. In the forest, you live until something bigger or stronger or smarter kills you or you get sick and you die. It isn’t unfair; it isn’t wrong. It's how things are. But the rest of you have always lived in houses and with laws and stuff like that, and that's great, but you forget that even with all that you live until something bigger or stronger or smarter kills you. If you sit around worrying about how it’s so unfair, then you don’t even get to live until it happens to you. For a while, I forgot about that.”

Stiles sat there chewing on her words and then said quietly. “What do you think I can do?”

“Lie to him. You're really good at lying.” Malia wasn’t accusing him or attacking him; she was saying what she thought was the truth. “Tell him that if he works really hard and gets better at being a werewolf, that he’ll be able to stop people like those assholes from killing anyone he cares about. Tell him that if he's a great alpha, he can help everyone and it doesn’t have to end in death and funerals. Tell him if he goes home and finishes school, you guarantee he’ll live fifty years and have a dozen babies with Hayden. Lie to him. Lie to him because you want him to be happy.”

Stiles took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. I can do that. But do you really think it's a lie?”

“Yes. It’s better to be really powerful because that means that there are less things that can kill you, but it's not a sure thing. People want sure things.”

Stiles smiled at her then, mostly to dispel the sadness. “Remind me why we broke up.”

“Because you complicate things, and I like things to be simple.” She said it without malice. “I’m not saying you’re wrong to want what you want, and I’ll always like you, but we’re never going to be simple.”

“Fair enough.” He got up off the couch with determination. “Can you take me to where he’s at? I can do this at least.” 

They left the house together, and for the first time in days, the ghosts stayed at home. All it took was for him to do something.

 

**August 7, 2013:**

After his talk with Malia and the resulting talk with Liam, he couldn’t bring himself to fall back into the routine of solitary misery. He could only escape the oppressive ghosts for so long in the narrow confines of his own house. There weren’t many places he felt he could go, either, but there was one place he wanted to go. He just wasn’t sure that the person who lived there would want to speak to him. 

A little after seven at night, he knocked on the Martin’s door. Maybe he should have called first, but for some reason he suddenly wanted to see her, and if he had called she might have told him that she didn’t want to see him for any number of reasons that meant little to him. Lydia didn’t come to the door, but her mother did. “Oh. Hello, Stiles.” She had warmed up to him considerably after the events of last fall. “Are you here to see Lydia?” 

He nodded. “If she wants to see me, yeah, I am. Would you ask her?” He’s being insecure right now. 

Natalie nodded, understanding what he meant, and he thinks maybe because the last five days hadn’t been any easier for Lydia than for him. The older woman asked him inside and then went up to the room to talk to her daughter.

It was not three minutes before there was a shout. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Stiles, get up here.” She was waiting for him in the bedroom, sitting on the bed, looking as beautiful as ever. She didn’t seem to be angry, but she didn’t look completely happy to see him. Why should she be happy to see him? Not this week.

“I didn’t know,” he began, as Lydia’s mother retreated down the hallway, “if I was being selfish, stupid, or respectful. I didn’t call you, and I didn’t even read the texts or calls people sent me, but I was – you know how I was. I wanted to see you, but I didn’t want to see anyone. Does that make any sense?”

“No more than usual.” The words were flippant, but she was serious and sad. “Come, sit down. We don’t have to talk, but I’m tired of being alone.”

They sat for a few hours, listening to music, not talking much at all. It was peaceful and quiet; he could almost imagine that nothing bad had happened for minutes at a time. Natalie hovered near the door once or twice, but Stiles figured she knew what stage of grieving this was, so she left them alone. 

“Lydia?” He asked in the darkness of the room, during a quiet song. “I need to ask you a question.”

She hummed him permission. 

“When we were in the car, you knew, but you didn’t say anything. Why?”

She sat there for five minutes. “I wanted to be wrong. I can be wrong, you know; it’s happened before. And then, there was a part of me that knew I wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t want to be strong right then. I hate being weak, you know that, and if I admitted what I knew to myself, I’d have to be strong. And, well ...” She paused, trying to work the words out before she said them. “Being strong meant I would have to hurt you, and I didn’t want to hurt you.”

Stiles leaned over and kissed her. It was a simple thank you, but even then, no matter how many times she had allowed it before, that she did allow it made his pulse climb and his brain melt. “I love you.” 

The moment was magic, but he left her then. He did not want to push it any farther, and then leave them both wondering if it was real love or just grief. They had time to work that out later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am always open to criticism. Since I want this to be canon to end of season 5, please let me know if I make mistakes in either characterization or facts. 
> 
> By the way, Scott is my favorite character, but for some reasons I keep hurting and killing him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Funerals, he decided, were like high school. They both were painful, they both went on forever, and they were both absolutely necessary. A funeral was also, he decided, like alchemy; it took that which could not be expressed by individuals and expressed it in a ceremony. It was hard to run around screaming about how angry or sad you were, but being at a funeral told everyone that you were indeed angry and sad. He watched as people enter the area where the service was being held; he read their faces as a sort of invocation.

**August 8, 2013:**

The night before the funeral, Stiles pulled up in front of the Animal Clinic. For a second, he thought he had arrived too late, that the veterinarian had gone home, but then he saw a shadow move in the darkened lobby. He went to the door and knocked. There was no answer, so he knocked again.

Eventually, Deaton came to the door. He looked the same as he always looked. “Stiles. I am sorry, but we’re closed.” His voice had a touch of weariness to it.

“I know, Doc, and I’m sorry for bothering you. I just ... as usual, I need your help. It’s important. May I come in?”

For just a second, he thought the veterinarian was going to close the door in his face, but then he opened it up wider. “What can I do for you?”

“I was hoping, I mean, I need something for tomorrow.” Stiles started lamely, but then he started to speak faster and faster. “Tomorrow is going to be rough on everyone, and the last thing anyone needs, the last thing I need, is to make it all about me. That means, there has to be no flailing, no panic attacks, no awkward outbursts. I have the rest of my life to deal with this, to feel bad and drive myself into the ground like it was any other day. I need to be in control tomorrow, but I am not going to be in control, because I can’t really deal with what’s happened, so I need something, anything, that can change me.” He took a deep breath. “And I am really hoping that you have some magic potion that will do that, because I need to be there. I have to be there. And I can’t be me.” He gestured at himself and then, as if he had an epiphany, he pointed at the veterinarian. “I need to be you.”

Deaton took a step back from him in dismay, as if Stiles had just belted him across the face. Before he could apologize, the veterinarian continued as if nothing had happened: “I see. Please wait here.” He then went back into his office, where Stiles knew he kept all his unique supplies. 

Stiles started walking again around the room, while he was waiting. There were ghosts here, too, tumbling over each other to get his attention. He circled the room, forcing himself to pay attention to trivia, until he came to a stack of papers on the counter. They were form letters. Stiles read one of them and then closed his eyes, swallowing. 

He still had his eyes closed when Deaton returned with a small bottle. “This drug should help you do what you need to do. It is very potent, so I have given you enough for four doses. Take one before you sleep tonight, one when you wake up, and one eight hours later. The last dose is just in case you feel that the drug’s effects are beginning to fade at an inopportune time. I will not tell you what it is; I will not share with you the recipe. It is very addictive, and in the end, you always need to focus on being true to yourself.”

Stiles nodded. “I understand.” Because he did understand. “But what is this? You’re leaving?” He waved the form letter to Deaton’s customers, telling him that the clinic would be closing at the end of the year.

Instead of answering the question directly, Deaton began talking about something else entirely that answered the question indirectly. It was infinitely annoying but completely typical. “There is a teaching with which I am familiar that equates the path of the seasons of the year with the paths of our lives. In Spring, we discover new things about ourselves and others, and we celebrate the promise which comes with those discoveries. In Summer, these new things blossom into the fullness of their being, and we enjoy their beauty. In Fall, time harvests what we have cherished, and these things wither and die, as all things must. In Winter, we mourn that which we have lost, and wait for Spring.”

Stiles just watched him with the bottle in his hand. 

“Here, the seasons pass too quickly, and the Winters are too harsh. I must wait for Spring somewhere else. I cannot stay, though I know I should. I hope you will forgive me.”

Stiles did not know what to say for a few moments. At first, he wanted to yell at the man. How would they do this without him? How could _he_ do this without him? But part of him understood it; hell, part of him wanted to leave Just as much. “I’ll forgive you on two conditions. First, you are going to leave anything you can spare here – books, powders, plants, anything – and you are going to teach me as much as you can about them before you go. Second, even after you are gone, you’re going to leave a way for me to contact you for advice, because there is no way I can do this on my own yet.”

“I think that is fair. I will see you tomorrow, Stiles.”

The lights went out in the building after Stiles left the clinic, but he did not see the veterinarian leave. Deaton must have been sitting alone in the dark.

 

**August 9, 2013:**

 

He felt stable when the alarm went off at 8:00 a.m. As he shook the sleep off his limbs, he felt rested, for the first time in days. The ghosts had retreated into the corners of the rooms and hid behind the closet door. There was a part of him that knew it was artificial; he wondered how many chances he would have today to test the power of that drug.

The first test was an e-mail. It arrived at 12:37 a.m. that morning.

 **Stiles:  
** **We are snowed in at La Paz. There is no way to make it. I am sitting here looking at the sky and it is unfairly pretty. The runway lights are buried in snow. I am trying not to be too angry or too sad. I left and now I am not there.  
**   
**There are a million things to say, and I have no words to say them. As usual.  
** **Derek**

Stiles felt the hit in the center of his chest, but the herbal remedy kept him steady and banished the flood that might have welled up from within. _Oh,_ he realized, _this is what it does._ Deaton had shown them several techniques over the years for looking inward in order to find the truth. This potion did the opposite; it made you look outward. It made you see only other people’s needs and feelings, and ignore your own. _God, that’s dangerous._

 **Derek:  
** **You are here. You have always been here. As usual.  
**   
**Don’t be a stranger. Give my love to Cora and Braeden.  
** **S.**

He showered, dressed in his best suit, and then went down to get some breakfast. He was not a robot; he was strong. He made sure his father was up and getting ready. He brushed off a serious talk about what he was feeling. “There’ll be time for that later.”

The day, of course, was bright and sunny, with just the hint of a breeze to move the occasional puffy cloud. With a detached anger, he scowled. It should be cold and rainy. It should be dreary and sad. His father left him to join with his deputies; he was going to have to work the press. Murder, after all, sold papers. Stiles suddenly flashed back to Kate Argent’s mistaken funeral. It was ironic to him that this one he was supposed to be at.

The second test was that the McCalls and Delgados had already arrived; he went straight to Melissa because that was where he had to go. He had not talked to her at all, but his detachment enabled him to shove the shame and anxiety down into a place where it had no power over him. She introduced him to each member of the extended families as the ‘best friend,’ and he never even winced. He even shook Rafael McCall’s hand with no antagonism. This was not the place. After that she drew him aside; he always marveled at her, how strong she was, and she wasn’t even dosed up on magic plants.

“You haven’t been over,” she said, which was her way of asking if he was all right. “You should come over.” This was her of way of asking him to let her take care of him.

“I’m sorry. There were a lot of things to deal with,” he answered, which was his way of telling her he was all right. “And, I’m sorry, Melissa, but I don’t think that would be a good idea.” That was exactly what it sounded like. 

She accepted it and gave him a hug. He whispered, “Don’t worry about anything. I have everything covered.” He did, after all. 

Funerals, he decided, were like high school. They both were painful, they went on forever, and they were absolutely necessary. A funeral was also, he decided, like alchemy; it took that which could not be expressed by individuals and expressed it in ceremony. It was hard to run around screaming about how angry or sad you were, but being at a funeral told everyone that you were indeed angry and sad. He watched as people enter the area where the service was being held; he read their faces as a sort of invocation. 

The third test was seeing the pack, suffering without the benefit of drugs. They sat with their families; except for Cory who sat with Mason. His family did not see the point in going to the funeral of a boy they hardly knew. They were miserable, which he assumed was how it was supposed to be. He did not want to admit it, but he was glad that his father had to work. The sheriff would try to make them feel better, and he didn’t think that was going to possible. Until the actual ceremony began, he too worked the crowd, with a hand on the shoulder and a soft word. He smiled at Lydia and held her hand for a moment. He spent a few extra moments with Liam, who, thank God, had decided to set an example for the others, sitting up ramrod straight and stoic. Only Stile notices how the boy clenched and unclenched his hands at regular intervals. 

He stopped by Chris Argent and Dr. Deaton. It was strange, as allies of the pack, that they seldom had an opportunity in the last four years to meet with each other. Perhaps they had more history than he knew, but today, they were sitting together. 

When only they could hear, he said to Chris. “Thanks for coming. It’s appreciated.” Chris moved slightly and smiled. Stiles didn’t react when he smelt the faintest aroma of alcohol coming off of him. Yeah, it was as bad as he thought. He always wondered what would happen if you compartmentalized yourself once too often. 

Turning to Deaton he said. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done this without you. Did we ever thank you two enough?”

“I didn’t need thanks,” the veterinarian replied. Chris kept that same smile on his face. “It was an honor.” 

Stiles was about to say more when he looked up. Satomi Ito was arriving at the funeral and she had brought what remained of her pack. He took a deep breath and wondered what he could possibly say that would be appropriate. He froze, when he remembered that this would be the first time that Liam, who was already upset, would be in the presence of another alpha on his territory. He glanced back, but saw that Liam hadn’t even turned that way. 

“Ito-san,” observed Deaton, “knows how to conceal herself better than those that you are used to. There should be no problem.” 

Stiles sighs and nods. “I should have anticipated she’d come. That’s what emissaries do, isn’t it? I gotta pick up my game.”

“You’re doing fine, Stiles,” Chris said, remotely. “Maybe you should take the time to actually . . . “ 

Stiles put his hand on Chris’s shoulder. “I have plenty of time for that. “ The gesture was intended to acknowledge what couldn’t be acknowledged right then. He moved off to talk to Alpha Ito.

He almost missed the fourth test. It was getting closer to the time when the actual ceremony was supposed to start, and he had made a final round, but when he started to return to his seat, he saw a girl he knew from school sitting in the back row. This was not dangerous, but he realized he didn’t actually know the person’s name. As far as he had knew, neither he nor any of his friends had ever spoken to the girl. It was perplexing. As he walked back toward his seat he started watching for people he did not know.

They were everywhere. Not creepy sightseers or slimy press, but people from the city – from the school, from the stores they went to, from the clubs they danced at. People about which he knew nothing, not even their names. They had come to this funeral. It staggered him to realize that they knew. Maybe they didn’t know exactly what or why, but they knew. His initial response was some strange feeling of pride, but it curdled under the sun. Who the fuck did they think they were, sharing in this? It wasn’t for them! It wasn’t for them at all. Before he could start shouting, he took the vial from his pocket and took the emergency sip. It cooled his nerves and he went back to his seat. 

Maybe he had taken too much of the drug, but the rest of the funeral blurred. He suspected that he could not truly process the whole thing right now, that the individual benefit from funerals was internal. He did not look forward to when he could process it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Valet had answered him, also in French, and Stiles noticed once again that he referred to the Surgeon as ‘Marcel.’ Yes. That’s what he remembered, but he hadn’t really thought about the connection until now. He fiddled with Google Translate until he got a translation of the Surgeon’s words: “For you. All for you.” He closed his eyes once again and thought about the story that Lydia had told him that she, in turn, had received from the Argents. It was funny that in the end, all the crazy, evil stuff that the Doctors had done – all the torture, murder, transformation – was not about power, not about knowledge, and not about philosophy. It was about a man trying to bring his best friend back from the dead.
> 
> “Whaddya know about that,” Stiles remarked sarcastically to the army of ghosts that pressed on him, threatening to steal all the light and air from the room, “I _am_ the bad guy.”

**August 13, 2013:**

 

After four days, he finally headed back down to the sheriff’s station. The ghosts were chasing him so hard that he was going to wear a groove into the floors if he didn’t leave the house. He almost went back to Deaton’s to beg for more of that potion, but he knew that Deaton wouldn’t give him any and he knew that he shouldn’t have any. Some things have to heal on their own.

The station had not changed much. Most of the deputies greeted him; everyone but Parrish, who simply stared at him. It was irritating. He did not want to meet that gaze and see the hellhound beneath the skin growling at him, accusing him of something as if he hadn’t already blamed himself for it.

When he got close to his father’s office, he heard shouting. It was Rafael McCall, back in full FBI douche mode, screaming at his father. “Fantastic,” he said low enough that only the ghost next to him could hear, though Stiles didn’t look at it to make sure.

“Stilinski, look me in the face and tell me that you think this is right, goddamn it. Look me in the face and tell me that this is why we have badges!” 

Stiles opened the door and his father was looking at McCall, raving in front of the desk. “I understand you’re upset, I’d be upset too . . . “ 

Stiles opened his mouth to say something about him not being sure why McCall had a badge, but before he could, Rafael was pointing at him as well. “Tell your son. Tell your son right now that this is _right!_ ”

“Agent, you need to calm down.” Now that he was in the room, his father grew angry. “Don’t drag my son into this.”

“What’s going on, Dad?”

McCall rounded on him. He was too angry to stop now. “It is called a plea deal, Stiles. The Beacon County prosecuting attorney is going to plead Dudek and Bell out to voluntary manslaughter. They’ll serve ten years, with a chance for parole in _five_.”

Now it was Stiles’ turn to yell. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?”

The sheriff put both hands on his face. 

“This county is corrupt. I’m going to dig under every rock until I get proof of that and I am going to send all of you to jail,” raged McCall. “No one is going to slander my son like that. No one. Do you hear me, Stilinski? No one!” He slammed the door so hard on his way out that the glass rattled.

“Dad, what? What’s going on?”

The elder Stilinski takes a deep breath. “Dudek’s and Bell’s defense attorney had a meeting with the prosecuting attorney – who you know is Jackson’s father right now – and presented their defense. After that, they asked for the deal. They’ll plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter.”

“How can you possibly claim manslaughter in an ambush?” 

“Voluntary manslaughter means killing someone when you believe your life or others’ lives are in danger. They would argue in their trial that killing Scott was the only way they knew to protect themselves and others.” His father paused. “Because he was a gang leader known as the Werewolf.”

Stiles choked at the stupidity. “What? Who’d believe them?”

The sheriff handed him a piece of paper. “That is the list of intended witnesses to be called by the defense to prove that their clients had a justified sense of danger.”

He snatched the paper and looked down the list, and he could feel his eyes straining as he read it. “This is blackmail.” He was on the list. His dad was on the list. Lydia and the rest of the pack. Jackson. Derek. Satomi Ito. Even Danny. Everyone who had ever had anything to do with what really happened in Beacon Hills.

“Yes. It was blackmail. Everyone’s life on that list would be ruined, either by exposing the supernatural or simply by making them perjure themselves.” His father sighed. “Mr. Whittemore and I decided that the deal was what was best for everyone.” 

It was obvious to Stiles the next questions had to be answered. “How did they know? How could they possibly know? They didn’t do this by themselves. There has to be someone else.”

His father wouldn’t meet his eyes. For the first time, it wasn’t for something Stiles had done, it was for something his father had been unable to do. “They aren’t talking. I can’t find a money trail. Whoever it was covered their tracks pretty well.”

After a small conversation about options – of which there were none – Stiles left his father’s office. By this point, news of the deal had probably reached the cops working here. They wouldn’t meet his gaze. All except Parrish of course, who was simply staring at him. 

Stiles had had enough. “What are you looking at?” He yelled at the deputy and then stormed out. 

Parrish caught up with him just outside, in the gathering dusk, before he could get into his jeep. He forgot how fast the deputy could run when the thing inside made itself felt. And that was who confronted him – not the gentle-eyed deputy, but the teeth and burning irises of the hellhound. “This is what must be. Be warned.”

Stiles responded with both middle fingers. “Go back to hell, buddy, we don’t need your shit here.” He got into the jeep and roared off.

&&&&&&

Stiles was pretty sure he may have broke the screen door when he came in. He slammed it almost as hard as McCall had slammed his father’s office door. And he knew why. “Manslaughter!” he shouted at the empty house. There were no answers. Of course, his phantom menagerie appeared from around corners, blinking at him. 

He had had enough of it. He picked up a picture taken five summers ago, at a trip to an amusement park, and threw it at the ghost who was standing over by the stair case. “Get out!” It shattered against the banister and sprayed glass across the room. It felt so good, giving into that. He picked up some knick-knack cats that had come from God knows where and tossed them at the scattering ghosts. He shouted at them to get out, to go away, to leave him alone. Glass and ceramic shattered with pleasing sounds as he tore around the living room. 

Finally, he grasped a framed picture. It was from before the hospitals, before the long dying. He held it in his hands and studied the face in it. Then he whispered. “This isn’t fair.”

Across the room, a beautiful ghost leaned against the door frame that lead into the kitchen. “It’s never been fair,” she whispered back, sadly.

He could not believe those assholes were going to spend as little as five years in prison because they knew how to force everyone to go along with a lie. He could not believe that after everything that happened, it had ended like this. He could not believe that son-of-a-bitch Parrish kept looking at him like he was the bad guy. As if he had wronged the universe and not those two fucking clowns in the city jail. He could not believe that someone that strong, that good was just dead. 

He raised the picture over his head. What was the use? He started crying. There was nothing he could do. No way to balance the scales. All the sadness, all the rage, all the ghosts weren’t just painful; they were useless. They couldn’t show him how to undo what had been done. 

Undo what had been done. He paused and carefully set down the framed picture of his mother.

What if the hellhound’s words weren’t an accusation but were meant as an actual warning? Something about this situation seemed familiar to him.

He ran upstairs to the Non-Evidence Room. He tossed one box completely to the side and then dove into another box filled with DVDs from security cameras. He was looking for a specific one from the outside of the Animal Clinic. Deaton had one put in after the Darach had snatched one of his customers one week and then the next week drug addicts had tried to bust in to rob his drug supply. It made him laugh – a bitter, hollow laugh – to realize that mundane crap like that still happened. What sense did that make?

He found it and went to play it in his room on his computer, ghosts following along his trail. It was the night when La Bete had been terrorizing the city, and Scott and Liam had brought the Surgeon, one of the Dread Doctors, to the clinic. The Surgeon had staged his spectacular and not-totally-unpredictable escape, and then he had met La Bete in his human form – Sebastian Valet – out in the parking lot. The Surgeon had took off his helmet in front of Valet – yeah, that was nasty – and spoke to him. “Pour tu. Tout pour tu.” 

Valet had answered him, also in French, and Stiles noticed once again that he referred to the Surgeon as ‘Marcel.’ Yes. That’s what he remembered, but he hadn’t really thought about the connection until now. He fiddled with Google Translate until he got a translation of the Surgeon’s words: “For you. All for you.” He closed his eyes once again and thought about the story that Lydia had told him that she, in turn, had received from the Argents. It was funny that in the end, all the crazy, evil stuff that the Doctors had done – all the torture, murder, transformation – was not about power, not about knowledge, and not about philosophy. It was about a man trying to bring his best friend back from the dead.

“Whaddya know about that,” Stiles remarked sarcastically to the army of ghosts that pressed on him, threatening to steal all the light and air from the room, “I _am_ the bad guy.”

He felt some pity for Marcel. How hard he must have worked, how difficult it would have been, to spend two centuries pushing the universe to give him back his friend, a monstrous psychopath who killed for sport and pleasure and some deranged sense of superiority. Did he ever think that maybe his friend didn’t deserve to come back? In the dark of the night, while his body rotted along with his soul, did the Frenchman ever worry that Valet wouldn’t be worth it? Maybe, maybe not. It was not like Stiles could ask him. He only knew he would never have that trouble, because there was not a doubt in his mind that his best friend deserved to come back. He was kind, he was good, he was noble, and the universe owed both of them this. 

Stiles would make sure that the universe paid up. He texted his father about the mess in the living room, and then he turned off the computer and went to sleep. 

 

**August 19, 2013:**

 

Stiles felt it was amazing how much having a clear goal could give you confidence. He spoke with utter conviction. “I’m not going to Irvine.”

He knew his father would object. “Stiles, of course you are. I know it’s been rough, but school starts next Monday.”

“I am not going. There’s too much to do here. I can’t be half-a-day’s drive away and do what needs to be done.”

“You get to have a life,” his father argued. “You’ve done enough.”

“What does that mean? I’ve done enough? There are things that need to be done here that only I can do. Just off the top of my head, who’s going to look after Liam? He’s a sixteen-year-old Alpha with a behavioral disorder, and his Risperdal doesn’t work anymore. Who is going to handle that? His parents, who he doesn’t want to tell? You?”

“That’s not your responsibility.” Both of them were going into stubborn mode. That wouldn’t end well, but Stiles couldn't let it go.

“Yes, it is, Dad, and you know it. There’s no one else. And before you say Deaton, you should know that he’s leaving. He’s put the clinic up for sale.”

“He’s what? I’ll have a talk with him . . . “

“Dad, think about it. Deaton, to know all he knows, must have trained for years to be an emissary. We know that emissaries exist to serve as advisors to the alpha and the pack. He’s served two alphas. The first one was a woman, whom he has basically admitted he was in love with, who burned to death in a fire set by a psychotic nutjob. The second one was a boy, who essentially became his surrogate son, who was hacked to death by two goons on the side of a highway. He couldn’t protect either of them. You think I’m upset? He might have the Zen master act down, but I’m sure if he had his choice, he’d never see another werewolf for the rest of his life. He’s probably more screwed up than I am.“

“And then there’s Chris Argent. You realize he’s not crawled out of the bottle since the day after he found out. He was sober just long enough for the funeral. He’s going to stick around for the . . . “ He makes finger quotes around the next word, “. . . ‘trial,’ but why would he stay a day after that? There’s no one left here for him but his abusive father. I hope he goes back to France and adopts scarf-boy, and I never see him again. Maybe he’ll be happy.” 

“What about you being happy?”

“Dad.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m not going to be a monk. I’m going to date the heck out of Lydia, and hopefully, if I don’t screw it up too much, she won’t run for the hills. I’m going to have fun; I’m going to have friends. I’m going to get a criminology degree from the local community college and after that, I’m going to use my contacts in the sheriff’s office to get a job as a deputy. I’m pretty sure I can talk the sheriff into it; he’s gullible. And I am going to protect the people I love.”

“What do you think I can do at Irvine? Join a fraternity and get drunk on weekends? Try to erase the last three years of my life? Even if I wanted to do that, which I don’t, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do that and look at myself in the mirror every morning. There’s a tree stump in that forest that draws all evil to it, like some sort of Veggietales Sauron. Three of us went into that water, and I’m the only one that’s left. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t understand what I was signing up for, it doesn’t matter that I did it for a noble reason, and it doesn’t matter how much I’ve already had to deal with. I did it, and there are consequences to that act that are going to happen even if I go to school in Los Angeles. “

His father leaned back. The look on his face was a mixture of resignation, frustration, and a little bit of pride. 

“S . . . “ He couldn’t say his name. Why couldn’t he say his name? “He gave them Hope. Deaton. Argent. Liam. Everyone. I can’t give them hope; that’s not who I am. All I can give them is Justice. Let me do that, Dad. Let me do it.”

His father relented. Stiles knew he would have in the end, because his father had taught him to know what was right. He did not want to leave any more, because he knew that things were the same everywhere. The universe would take and take and take, and it wouldn’t give anything back, unless he made it give it back. The only place he could learn how to do that was right here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been a long time since high-school French. I think I did the translation of Marcel's speech right. It made no sense that he would say it in English. I used to use the polite form, until someone pointed out that love most likely makes it the informal form. Yes, I ship Marcel x Sebastien! OTP! *wink*


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What about your life? What about you being safe?”
> 
> Stiles made a dismissive sound. “That’s my choice. I figured out long ago, that whatever I choose to do with my life, it has to be about more than just keeping my skin intact. I’ve got to be about more than just surviving, Chris. I’ve seen what happens when staying alive becomes someone’s only goal. So have you.”

**August 31, 2013:**

Stiles waited as patiently as he could at the entrance to the Argent Industries building. Patiently, of course, meant alternating between pacing in a narrow circle, glancing at his phone to check the time every ninety seconds, and studying the old factory. Frankly, the building was looking even worse than he remembered it being in the aftermath of the assault by the rogue hunters. Still, as far as his amateur eyes could tell, the building was still solid. It just needed a little work.

Chris’s SUV pulled up within five minutes of the time they had agreed upon, which was a good sign. Stiles hadn’t seen him since the funeral, so he wasn’t sure what type of person would get out of the vehicle. Mr. Argent had barely held it together at the funeral. He relaxed a bit when he saw a normal person – beard groomed, clothes clean, and no overpowering smell of alcohol. 

“Stiles, what’s going on?” Chris was direct and to the point as usual. 

“I swear it is nothing bad, but it is something that had to be done face-to-face.” He promised. “I have a proposition for you, Chris, and I know it is going to be a tough sell, but I am confident that you are eventually going to go along with it. Because you always love my plans.”

Chris nodded, and that was a bad sign; he was humoring him. Argent never really liked his plans. 

Stiles took a deep breath. He had rehearsed this in the mirror for hours, last night. “You’re planning on leaving, aren’t you? Soon.”

Chris nodded again; he was being terse and uncommunicative. “I think I have to.” Stiles assumed that he had already packaged everything from this last month away to be dealt with on the fifth of Never. 

“I thought so. So ... what is going to happen to this place?”

“I have already had what needs to be removed, removed. I’ll have it put on the market soon.” Chris’s brow creased at Stiles’ interest. 

Stiles took a deep breath. “I’d like you to think about an alternative. I would like you to invest money in the building, repair it, make some alterations, and then hire me to manage it while you are out of town.” Before the shocked look on Chris’s face could fade, he went into an extensive monologue where he explained what he saw for the building. He had to get it all out before Chris could shut him down.

“Let me get this straight: you want me to turn this into a safe house for hunters, with you in charge.” Chris said this slowly, as if he thought it was a great big joke. “You never liked what we do.”

“It’s not about liking what you do. I don’t like what you do, but even I know that sometimes it’s necessary. I’ve seen brutal assholes that need killing, and I don’t care what species they are. But you know and I know that hunters are going to come here, and not all of them have your ethical standards. If I am going to protect my pack and all the other people I care about, I need to be able to keep an eye on them. If I run the safe house that they’ll use, then I will know when they’re here and what they’re doing.“ Stiles shrugged as if it would be the simplest thing in the world. 

“You want that responsibility?” Chris prodded at him. “It will not be easy. If the hunters who come here find out about your relationship with the pack, they will assume you are spying on them. They could kill you.”

“It is a possibility. I don’t really want the responsibility, but I don’t want anyone else to die. I think we both know that people not-dying doesn’t happen just because you want it so much; you have to do something about it. I can do this.”

Chris sighed. “Stiles, if this is about . . . “

Stiles cut him off sharply. “We aren’t here to talk about the past. This is about the future. “ He softened after a moment. “I’m sorry, but right now, I have to think about the future. That’s where I am focused, and I’m really fucking serious right now, Chris.”

Chris looked at him, not with pity, but with appraisal. “Show me.”

Stiles took his trump card out from his bag where he had hidden it. It was a leather glove, but it had a werewolf’s claws attached to the end. “These are Talia Hale’s claws. I took them out of the Hale Vault where Derek put them for safe keeping. That means there are five people in the world that can access that vault and the treasures in it – one is in an asylum for hopefully the rest of his life, one is my ex-girlfriend, two aren’t even on this continent, and the last is me. I will be the emissary for the ...” He had to stop for a moment. “ ... for the Dunbar pack. Deaton is giving me a crash course before he leaves in everything I need to know, and he’s going to help arrange more training for what we don’t have time to get to. I will control the Hale Family legacy in Beacon Hills. If you agree to my proposal, I will have a copy of your bestiary, a small supply of weaponry, and any other books and materials you care to leave behind. I’ll be your representative here, which means I’ll control the Argent Family legacy in Beacon Hills. Finally, I am the person who is most spiritually connected to an active Nemeton. I am the son of the sheriff, and I intend to become a deputy here. This may not be as cool as being able to tear car doors off, but it is not insignificant either.”

Chris stood there, waiting for him to continue.

“Of all the people I’ve met, you are the one of the most pragmatic people I know. The world isn’t safe. The world is dangerous, and if you want to protect people, you have to have the power to fight. I am asking you to help me get that power.”

“What about your life? What about you being safe?”

Stiles made a dismissive sound. “That’s my choice. I figured out long ago, that whatever I choose to do with my life, it has to be about more than just keeping my skin intact. I’ve got to be about more than just surviving, Chris. I’ve seen what happens when staying alive becomes someone’s only goal. So have you.”

Chris stood there and looked into the distance; obviously, an argument was taking place inside his head. Stiles bit his tongue to stop himself from saying anything more. 

Chris finally spoke, slowly. “If anyone should stay, it should be me.” 

“You know that’s not true. I have reasons to stay. You don’t. This is my home. Can you really say that this is yours anymore?”

Chris nodded once again, but this time it wasn’t a gesture meant to display he was paying attention. It was an affirmation of Stiles’ argument. They started to talk about the plans, but Stiles knew that he had already won. 

 

 **September 14, 2013:**

 

The month after the funeral was quiet. One could even say it was peaceful; it felt like the end of July. “Fool me once ... “ Stiles muttered to the last of the summer days. He waited in the parking lot of the high school on a Saturday morning. There was work to be done and he itched to get started, but he knew the value of patience. As he waited for the others to arrive, he looked over at the lacrosse field in the back of the school. Phantoms were running across it. 

As the car pulled up, he turned around and put on his best smile. He knew that with the amount of lies he was going to tell today, that this was going to take some finesse. “Hey. How you guys doing? Sorry for stealing your Saturday.”

Hayden smiled back at him. She had become one of the happier and more easy-going werewolves he had ever met. Not only had the bite transformed her from a chimera to a real werewolf, it had also solved her ongoing medical problems. She didn’t have to work at Sinema or anywhere else anymore; Stiles always meant to rib his Dad about the number of underage kids who seemed to be able to get into clubs. She seemed grateful for every day she had. Stiles liked her. When he compared her to some of the other betas he had known, he liked her a lot. 

Corey was different both in temperament and history. He was not as fearful as he used to be, but he was still someone whose first thought was to retreat, to make sure about safety, to hide. Not as endearing, but Stiles figured he’d probably out live the rest of them. 

“Okay, I asked you here this morning, because I have a suspicion that there are interested parties planning to scavenge what they could about the Doctors’ old equipment and supply caches.” It was not technically a lie, because he had a suspicion he was that interested party. It was close enough to the truth that he hoped it would slide past Hayden. As far as he knew, Corey didn’t have the same heightened senses that a werewolf had. “I thought, and I talked this over with Liam, that maybe, just once, we could get the jump on something so the bad stuff doesn’t actually happen. If you guys are okay with this, I need you to help me go to every place you ever were when you were with Theo, and help me look for things that may have been left behind.” 

Hayden nodded enthusiastically; she had always been proactive. Stiles knew she would be easy to convince. “That sounds like a good idea. I really don’t want to run into anyone who wants to get their hands on that. Do you think it’ll take us the whole day?” 

Corey didn’t look all that pleased. “Sure. It’s a good idea, I guess.”

“No, I don’t think it’ll take the whole day. We’ll find the places, figure out what is left, and I’ll plan the clean up.” He knew they would be horrified if they understood what he planned to do with anything useful they would discover. “Weekends are important. I have school, too.”

They loaded into Roscoe. Stiles tried to put them at ease by distracting them with another conversation. “So, you two know that Dr. Deaton’s leaving.”

“I heard.” Hayden said. “Liam doesn’t seem to be concerned.”

Stiles chuckled. “That is because your boyfriend is an idiot. He is content to have me as his Emissary, which should make us all doubt his leadership capabilities right now. I’m going to try my best, but I am going to be pretty amateur; you’ve got to understand. Now, you know what I am supposed to do, right?”

“You’re kind of like a mentor and a doctor, right?” Corey asked. 

“It’s probably better to go with advisor. I’m not that much older than you, so I’ll look pretty stupid trying to mentor you. As for the doctoring, I think I’ll leave that to Melissa. I’d joke that you guys are screwed with me as an advisor, but part of the job is inspiring confidence. Are you inspired yet?” He laughed. “All joking aside, if you have problems that can’t be solved by growling at things, then I will try to help as best I can. Deaton was pretty reserved; I don’t do reserve, but I want you to know that you can call me at any time, for any reason. I will do my best, and if I don’t know the answer, I have plenty of people on speed dial who might.”

Hayden got a strange look in her eye. “Today isn’t just about finding where they were, and it’s not just why you asked us here. You want to talk about the stuff they did to us.” 

Stiles smiled reassuringly. _Crap, she’s more perceptive than I thought._ “Yeah. Yeah, kinda. You two seem to be doing just fine, but I wouldn’t want to risk not knowing things and have it crop up later. There’ve been no problems, or anything like that, right? If there is, I really need to know about it sooner than later.”

Corey shifted uncomfortably in the back seat. He never liked talking about the past, even though he was the last original chimera. “No. No problems.”

“Good. I hope we never have any, but ... “ Stiles sighed. “You can never tell what’s going to happen, can you?”

Both of them grew somber, but they did not seem to be too resistant to his suggestions. Every member of the pack had been dismayed when last month’s murder had happened, and they had dealt with it in different ways. Hayden had tried to be extra supportive of Liam as he came to terms with what happened. Corey had started talking to Melissa on occasion. It was nice of him to do that, since Stiles himself could hardly bear to be in the same room with her anymore. 

Stiles swore silently that he would be a good friend to them and a good Emissary. He would hurt as few people as possible on the way to his ultimate goal. 

&&&&&&

They had hit every place that the chimera and the former chimera had known about. Stiles had carefully cataloged anything that might look remotely useful and taken pictures of both it and the larger stuff that would be need to be destroyed. He had sent Hayden and Cory home when they were sure –as sure as they could be – that they had been everywhere. He could see they were getting anxious, and he did not want to stress them any more than he had to. It would take him a couple of weeks to gather the small stuff together and take it to the special rooms he had constructed at Argent Industries; then he could get the pack to utterly destroy the rest. 

However, in the next to last place they had checked, Stiles had found what he had hoped he would be able to find. It was a locked box; he estimated it came from the era of the First World War. Sturdy and wooden, it was secured by a padlock that was pretty easy to pick when he got it home. Sure enough, there were journals and research notes inside. 

There was going to be some trouble, he observed. The Doctors had upgraded their note keeping over the years, starting with hand-written journals, typewritten script, vinyl records, videotapes, cassettes, and finally even a dozen CDs and DVDs. It was going to take him a good long time to work through this. He sat down, opened the first book and then cursed like a demon.

“I don’t read French.”

The ghost across the room laughed at him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who are you,” Lydia teased from over a glass of champagne she had totally conned the waiter into letting them have, “and what have you done with Stiles Stilinksi?” 
> 
> “I knocked him over the head and put him in a closet,” Stiles replied from the other side of the table at the fanciest restaurant in Beacon Hills that he could afford. In the distance, an actual band was playing dance music. They were the youngest people here, but he did not even mind. “He’s used to that.”

**December 31, 2013:**

“Who are you,” Lydia teased from over a glass of champagne she had totally conned the waiter into letting them have, “and what have you done with Stiles Stilinksi?” 

“I knocked him over the head and put him in a closet,” Stiles replied from the other side of the table at the fanciest restaurant in Beacon Hills that he could afford. In the distance, an actual band was playing dance music. They were the youngest people here, but he did not even mind. “He’s used to that.”

“That was a good move. Honestly, when you asked me to spend New Year’s Eve with you, I did not expect this.” She laughed and leaned back in her chair, tossing her hair back in a gesture that meant she was pleased. He always melted when she smiled like that, but, at this point, no one he knew could possibly be surprised about that fact. 

He decided to affect a mock seriousness. “We’re college students, Lydia. Isn’t it time we start acting like serious, grown adults.” He kept a straight face for almost a minute, but he couldn’t hold it and he laughed out loud. She joined him, but after they stopped, he went on, now truly serious. “I wanted tonight to be special. There’ll be plenty of other nights where he can hang with the pack and eat pizza and watch movies. Tonight, I thought I would treat myself, with some help from you, to quality you-time.”

“You certainly went for quality.” He could tell that Lydia was flattered, and he knew that this was among her favorite experiences, because she was also not feeling vulnerable. She was flattered because they were doing what he wanted, and that it was also something she wanted to do. It had taken him a long time to figure out that one-sided things left her cold. She smiled at him, a genuine smile, and the bloom in his stomach reappeared, as it always did. “I am a little frightened that you are going to propose to me or something like that.”

He shook his head, with what he hoped was a degree of charm. “No, I am not going to propose to you. It’s far too early for that, yet. I can guarantee that if I do propose to you, you will never see it coming.” He thought back to two years ago, when her teasing would have robbed him of both the ability to speak and full control of his limbs. “Tonight is simply a demonstration of how I figured out this formal dating thing. It was a bit of a mystery before.” 

She gave him a twist of her lips. “Have you? Explain it to me.”

“There are four types of normal romantic interactions.” He held up his right hand, fingers splayed and pointed to each one in turn with his left pointer finger. “The first, the pinkie, is hanging out. Studies show that ‘hanging out’ seems to be the least stressful form of romantic interaction, but it is very, very important. It explores compatibility; you’ll spend most of your life hanging out with whomever you are with. I think we have that covered though in our lives. The second, the ring finger, is the casual date. It helps define your relationship as more than just hanging out. It is the first serious indicator that you are romantically involved. I also suspect that once you get married and have children, casual dates will be the foundation of your life together. The third, the dreaded group date is – ugh.” He momentarily lowered the other fingers to form the bird. “The fourth kind of date, this kind of date, is the formal date. And it is here where the animals in Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom display their intention to find a mate.”

Lydia laughed merrily. “So now we are in a mating ritual.”

“Yes.” He nods. “A romantic mating ritual. When I was a callow and hyperactive teenager, I thought that it was all about showing you how much I love you.” He affected what he hoped would be a suave, romantic confidence – how many Cary Grant movies did he watch? – but his pulse was pounding in his veins. “But I have learned it’s not. Like the proud peacock spreading his feathers, the formal date is the way one partner demonstrates to another that they are a mate worth considering.” 

“So that’s what this is. You want to show me why I should go on more dates with you.”

“I think that’s pretty much established, isn’t it? I am a peacock.” He laughed a little too loud; this was going to go really well or it was going to go really badly. He knew that Lydia wasn’t going to put up with anything less than your best. “You and me have a fifth type of date.” He extended his thumb. “That is the romantic interlude while nasty things are trying to kill us, but I felt it best not to rely on that one too much. It can get tiresome. So, tonight, let me show you what I’ve got.” He extended the open hand to Lydia. “Would you care to dance?”

She put her hand in his and let him pull her up. “I would be delighted. Tell me, Stiles, how long did you practice that speech?” 

He took a breath to steady himself. “Weeks.” He led her out on the ball room floor. “Almost as long as I have practiced this very archaic and difficult form of dancing.” He complained with a smile. “Mason always wants to lead.”

Stiles was not nearly as bad as he thought he was going to be, which led to many internal fist pumps. He did not step on her feet, though he wasn’t going to win any ballroom dancing awards. For a while, just a little while, it was he and Lydia alone. No one at the restaurant cared about Stiles Stilinski and Lydia Martin, and the ghosts were nowhere to be seen. The time, a dirty traitor, flew by and the clock raced toward midnight. 

The clock said it was a half-hour until the ball would drop; the band was playing “Sentimental Journey.” She whispered in his ear, “I am having a great time tonight. How did you figure this out?”

Stiles sighed softly, but he still answered her question. “If I tell you, it might ruin the mood.” She nodded both her insistence that he do so and her permission. 

“I studied you. I mean – that sounds creepy – I mean I looked at what you chose to do rather than who I imagined you to be. You have always been attracted to guys who want something more than just you. Jackson wasn’t sure what he wanted, but he wanted something other than what he had. Aiden always took what he wanted, even though if it might not have been the right thing. Jordan believes in what he is doing, no matter what else is going on. You don’t want a worshipper. You don’t want a nice guy or a stalker. You don’t need someone to tell you that you are beautiful or smart – though you are beautiful and smart and you do enjoy hearing that. You want someone willing to be your equal. So here I am, trying to prove myself your equal.”

“I’ll accept that as a good answer.” She kissed him on the cheek and he felt kind of bubbly. “So you know what you want to do with your life, or are you still figuring it out?” 

He smiled, sadly. “I have a plan. I can tell you part of it.” He proceeded to tell her that part – the part about being a deputy, about being responsible, about bringing justice. He knew he had to be confident to speak of it as if it were something important and true. It was important and true, but he knew that if he waffled or meandered, he could lose the thread. So he didn’t. 

What was best of all, even as he spooled it out is that she never got tired of listening. She listened carefully, actively, gratefully. He was amazed he didn’t trip over his own feet. He never mentioned the project, however, or any steps he was taking toward it. She would understand, he knew, but she wouldn’t approve.

They danced afterwards. They weren’t even talking, just enjoying each other’s company as the clock inched closer to midnight. By the time the old year died, he was just brave enough to kiss her once again.

 

**May 17, 2014:**

 

As if the universe wanted to make it up to him – _not a chance, motherfucker_ , he replied to the impersonal forces – the first supernatural incident into Liam’s tenure turned out to be extraordinarily frightening but not terribly dangerous. Lydia was at school, so they did not get any forewarning of the single death that started it: a middle-aged man found out on the highway. Coroner report showed a massive coronary; it was almost pleasingly normal, if someone’s death could please you. The only reason the pack started investigating was because it was suspiciously near that damn stump. 

When his father had identified the victim, they discovered he had worked in a carnival that was presently active in the next county over. 

“A haunted carnival!” exclaimed Mason. “This is going to be great!” 

It actually turned out to be the opposite of great. The carnival, on the surface, seemed to be just like every other carnival, both garish and run down at the same time. Malia was delighted, of course; Stiles nearly slapped himself when he realized they had never taken her to the circus or an amusement park and she hadn’t been to one of those when she was younger. By time you were in high school, people who didn’t want to be considered nerds had dismissed that stuff as entertainment for children.

It turned out that the culprit was hiding in the House of Mirrors, because that wasn’t a cliché or anything. The culprit also had the ability to manifest illusions from its victim’s minds, which is always fun and never traumatic. People were also working for it, though right now he was hearing Liam and the others beating the tar out of them outside. He was in central room of the House of Mirrors, trying to get Corey to snap out of whatever fun nightmare landscape that he was in. As far as Stiles could tell from his panicked mumbling, it had his parents selling him to the Dread Doctors for a Bermuda vacation.

“You know,” he shouted, “I am really tired of all this hallucination crap, but if we are going to actually do this, let’s leave the Invisible Boy out of this. He’s an amateur, and I am a pro at this shit. You want to mess with people’s heads, time to step up to the big leagues.” 

Challenge accepted. And suddenly the army of ghosts clustered around him, more real and tangible than he had ever seen it before. He saw them all, staring at him as if he had the answers, as if he were responsible. Though only he was reflected in the mirrors, the illusion allowed him to see himself standing next to them, standing behind them. 

“Try harder,” he sneered, covering the swallow in his throat. “I see this on days that end in ‘y.’”

“I can’t believe it, Stiles; you’re enjoying this without me.” The ghost’s voice was so sad, so full of disapproval _No, no, no._ Stiles talked to the ghosts; they didn’t talk to him unless he wanted them to. 

“Nice one.” Stiles tried to sound flippant but his voice cracked. “But that’s enough. You cut this out right now or I’ll have Liam tear this whole place down!” Intimidation might work; whoever the villain was, maybe they needed the House of Mirrors. “You have to be able to read my mind to do this, so you know he will.”

“You mean that; they do what you say. They’re yours now.” The ghost sounded so sad and tired. “Were you envious?” 

He thought, given his vast experience with traumatic visions, that he would be able to keep a level head in this situation. He knew it was not real; the ghosts weren’t actually ghosts for anyone but him. He should have been able to resist whatever it threw at him. But whatever this freaking monster was, it seemed to hone in on the most tender spots. He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t crippled with emotional pain, he was angry. “You stop this, you hear me? You stop this right now. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill everyone you love!” 

He must have hit something hard. He heard a gasp; it sounded small and scared. It wasn’t from a ghost, but before he could process that, he felt another ghost had appeared on his right. “One by one. You have to say it all, or it doesn’t count, desu ka?”

“Wait.” He closed his eyes and staggered back to dismiss that particular apparition. He took a deep breath and thought about rather than felt what was happening. “Wait. These aren’t meant to control us. They aren’t meant to stop us. They’re just meant to get at us. Make us . . . “

He opened his eyes and the army was pressed up on him, like he was on a crowded subway, but the arrival of that particular ghost had made him think. It took everything he had to say in a more compassionate tone: “You’re feeding. You aren’t trying to kill us. You’re extracting the most powerful emotions you can find.” 

“I don’t kill people,” said a girl’s voice, sad and desperate, from somewhere behind the mirrors. “I just break them.” 

“Then stop. We can help you. I can help you.” The ghosts laughed at him. “This can stop before any more people get hurt.” 

He did eventually get her to stop. Her name was Anne. She was a vampire, though not the blood-sucking undead kind, but the psychic emotion-draining kind. The victim on the highway had been her father. She was fifteen; as she grew older she had begun to feed more deeply and more often than when she was younger and it had been growing dangerous. She had driven her mother away by accidentally draining all the love she felt for her daughter from her one afternoon. They had joined the carnival so that Anne could secretly feed on all the heightened emotions from the crowd. Her father and Anne had influenced the carnival to come near Beacon Hills, because they had heard of the Nemeton and had hoped that it would be powerful enough to cure Anne’s hunger. It wasn’t; he could have told her that, but after the attempt had failed, her father had mistakenly tried to console her. The strain had been too much for him. 

As Liam negotiated with Anne and her minions – it seems that some people would do anything to get rid of certain negative emotions, a feeling he could totally sympathize with – Stiles backed him up with information and advice. This is what he was supposed to do, but he also hoped that no one would be able to tell that his hands were shaking. Anne’s instinctual attacks had come close to overthrowing him.

That could not happen again; no one should be able to get inside his mind and shake his resolve. A skilled manipulator could destroy everything he was trying to accomplish. He would have to study harder.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter Hale and Stiles locked eyes. Finally, the madman looked away with a chuckle. “Ahhhhh, the benefits of hindsight. I should have bit _both_ of you. You were always a matched set. How does it feel to have half a soul, Stiles? Does it feel like a wound that won’t close? Or does it feel liberating, like casting off dead weight?” 
> 
> Stiles stood up and pushed his chair back, with the metal shrieking against the floor. “God, I can’t express how much I don’t want to listen to you anymore.” He moved to leave. He had what he wanted, and he had paid the price for it.

**September 8, 2015:**

Stiles hated Eichen House. Nothing ever good happened here; nothing good would ever happen here. He supposed that was the point, wasn’t it? If you were damaged, you came here; if you damaged others, you came here. He knew that the management had changed; he knew that Dr. Fenris had installed brand-new procedures for screening the facility’s workers. He was long past the point of being afraid, but he was still uncomfortable within its gated walls. Terribly uncomfortable. Amazingly uncomfortable. Part of him realized that it was probably due to the fact that if certain people knew of his extracurricular activities, he might become a permanent resident.

All of that was not going to make it any easier to do what he had come to do, but after two years of work, he needed to make sure he was on the right track. After assisting the director in some sensitive tasks, much as Deaton had once done, he had finagled the right to pay a visit to one of the inmates.

After seeing who his visitor was, the man on the bed turned away. “And why would I want to talk to you at all?”

“Because you are a talker, Peter; you like to talk. Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but I am sure that I am a step up from the usual banter with the orderlies.” He tried to exude a confidence he truly didn’t feel. He was no longer the same kid who Peter terrorized four years ago, but even he knew just how dangerous the werewolf could be. “Don’t you want to have someone new to talk with?” 

When there was no reply, Stiles continued. “What we have here is the opportunity for a real ‘Silence-of-the-Lambs’ situation. Creepy expert on creepy stuff discussing said creepy stuff with eager, attractive investigator. Quid pro quo and all that. How can you resist?”

“Does that make you Clarice?” Stiles was totally a Will, but then he realized that Peter had never gotten a chance to watch the new _Hannibal_. Stiles didn’t care as long as he got the information he wanted. The mad werewolf rolled over on the bed. “Fine. Since I am the home team, I get the ball. Why are you my first visitor?”

Stiles thought about how he wanted to play with this topic for a moment. He decided to go with the truth. He knew how to lie to werewolves, but he was also going to take some pleasure in some needless tormenting. “I need something from you, or I wouldn’t be here. I am sure what remains of your family would have come and visited you by now if they had any idea that you were still here.”

Peter couldn’t hide both the surprise on his face and the way it drew a growl from his lips. “Fair enough. Your turn.”

“I want to know about your resurrection.” Peter gestured for him to continue. “From what I’ve been able to learn from my own research, they’re a big deal even in the supernatural community. That I’ve been witness to six of them makes me pretty damn special. Why is that so?” 

Peter smirked for a moment. “You aren’t asking me for new information. You are asking me to confirm what you already think you know. I can do that. The magic of resurrection is extraordinarily difficult because, unlike most magic, each spell is completely unique to both the subject and the caster. Most magic is general in theory but specific in application, but not something as potent as this. Each spell must be tailored. What I did to bring myself back is unique to me.” He smiled nastily again, regaining more of his old predatory self. “My turn. How is your father?”

Stiles paled. That was not a question he had been expecting. “He is fine. Perfectly fine. Healthy as a horse.” His next words were out of his mouth before he realized that he said them. “Why ask me that?” _Damn it_ , he thought, _now Peter had the advantage_.

“I asked you that because there are only three people in this world for which I suspect you would even dream of trying something like this. Since your father is alive, and I know that Lydia is alive, that leaves only ... “

“Stop right there. You say the name and I walk out of this wretched prison and you’ll never see me again. How did you know?”

“Ah-ah-ah, it is my turn to ask the question. Don’t be rude. I would ask you the how, but I can see you are already emotional. So I will ask something that while more painful will be less drawn out. Why did he die?”

 _You fucking bastard_. “Because I was me and because he had to be him. It’s easy to ambush people who don’t automatically assume you’re a murderer. Now how did you know?” 

“During my time, I only bit two people that I did not kill. That bond goes both ways, and while most others may not technically consider me an alpha, I’m not most others. When I put my mind to it, I could sense them both, so I knew that it had happened soon after it happened. Who is the alpha now?” 

Stiles considered telling Peter to go to hell and walking out. He did not want to put a target on Liam’s back, but Peter was right – he had his own ideas but he needed confirmation. Right then, he made a vow; he would do whatever it took to protect his alpha from Peter. “Liam Dunbar. Now, tell me what I need to know.” 

“There are four things you need in order to bring back someone from the dead. The first three are from the subject: body, mind and spirit. They are all equally important. You bring the body back without the mind and spirit, and you get the walking dead, and what good is that? You bring the body and the mind back without the spirit, though, and you get an abomination – something that looks and acts like the subject but really isn’t. I am sure you have seen enough horror movies to know what happens then. The spirit is the trickiest part, and it is why what we are talking about is so rare.” 

“That he was what he was is probably the only reason why whatever you are cooking up has the slimmest chance of working. When a person dies, the body rots and the mind vanishes, but the spirit – or soul if you want to get technical – leaves. No one knows where, though all the world’s religions take a good stab at it. You can retrieve and preserve the body, you can record and store the mind, but you have to find a way to hold onto the spirit. Both you and I are lucky, because with Alpha werewolves, the spirit doesn’t leave. Not completely.” 

Stiles nodded. Confirmation. The time and energy that Marcel had put into his project was exhausting, because the body, mind, and spirit of the subject were almost totally annihilated. Liam was going to hate him so much. “You said four things.” 

“The last is power -- a lot of power. The amount will be dependent upon the condition of the other three. I didn’t need near as much power as you will. All I needed was a full moon and a birthday party brimming with adolescent hormones amplified by poisoned punch and channeled into my surrogate. If I made it look easy, that is because compared to what you are contemplating, it was. I had years to prepare, and I was dead for little under a month. My question – where do you think you are going to get the power to do this?”

Stiles shrugged. “You really have to ask? I’ve been hoarding as much power as I can, but I think it should be obvious that I’ll be relying on a giant tree stump with which I have a close personal relationship.” He sneered. “So, what am I forgetting?”

“Without knowing more of the means and methods you are using, there is not much more that I can say. I supposed I could look for flaws in the plan if you would share more of the details with me.”

“Sure.” Stiles drawled. “Oh, wait – no, I don’t think so. I know you already have two to three plans in the works to get out of this place. The last thing I need is to tell you things you could use if and when you escape.”

“Five plans, actually, but these things take time.” Peter smiled sourly. “Where do you think you are right now, Stiles? Do you imagine yourself on a precipice, looking over the brink into the abyss below? Do you imagine me staring back up at you? Do you think you are still better than me?”

“I don’t imagine you anywhere. I do imagine what is going to happen if you try to stop me or if you look crossways at Liam.”

“A death threat? Seriously?” Peter joked. He was living in the past, used to dealing with the old Stiles. The one before him had grown up and had done things that might shock the ex-alpha.

“No. No death threats, Peter; they won’t work on someone like you. I won’t kill you; I’ll burn you. I’ll cook your insides like I was deep frying a turkey. I’ll put you in a coma so deep that you won’t heal your way out of it until I am sipping Geritol in the old folks’ home. I see your face in Beacon Hills and free, and I won’t hesitate.” 

Peter Hale and Stiles locked eyes. Finally, the madman looked away with a chuckle. “Ahhhhh, the benefits of hindsight. I should have bit _both_ of you. You were always a matched set. How does it feel to have half a soul, Stiles? Does it feel like a wound that won’t close? Or does it feel liberating, like casting off dead weight?” 

Stiles stood up and pushed his chair back, with the metal shrieking against the floor. “God, I can’t express how much I don’t want to listen to you anymore.” He moved to leave. He had what he wanted, and he had paid the price for it.

Peter shouted after him one final taunt. “You’re already over the precipice, Stiles! You’ll be back soon enough! I’ll have them save a cell next to mine!” 

 

**January 14, 2017:**

 

Stiles leaned over the old man in the hospital bed and gave him an injection in the arm. It was a rare herb and very potent, so he had only given the patient just enough to wake him up. 

“Hey, pops!” He said brightly as Gerard Argent came back to consciousness; Stiles hid his left hand behind his back. “Don’t struggle, don’t struggle. You’re on a ventilator.” He nodded emphatically as the old man thrashed around the breathing tubes. “The drug I gave you will keep you conscious for a while, but it won’t last that long, and I really don’t want to hear anything you have to say. You can nod, can’t you?” 

Glaring, the old man nodded. While the hunter had always been intimidating, he was less so now, laid up in a bed and barely able to move.

“I had to come visit you. I really had to, and when I knew you were in a bad way, I took my chance.” He kept himself where Gerard could see him. “You feel so much better, don’t you? It’s a wonderful drug, yes? Deaton taught me all about it. While it is a bitch to get, it’s very handy when the body is just too worn down to do anything else. I suspect you could have lived another decade on it, but it was too bad you were such an unbearable prick to everyone that no one told you about it.”

The old man continued with the death glare. Stiles felt a twinge of satisfaction. Hell, more than a twinge. He felt the stirrings of a full-bore revenge in his gut.

“I know all about the secrets of the Druids now. It is fascinating stuff – about life and death and the balance of the universe.” He hadn’t been able to talk to anyone for the longest time without concealing his emotions and some very unpleasant facts, but now that he had a captive audience, the words poured forth. “I know a lot of stuff now. I have the Hale bestiary and what remains of their library. I have the Argent bestiary and their library – yeah, after you fucked your son’s life over for the umpteenth time, he didn’t want it anymore, so good job there – and I even found the Dread Doctor’s journals and their research. All that knowledge to be researched, and I was always the research guy, you remember.” 

Gerard looked like he wanted to say something but the breathing tubes prevented it. Sucked to be him. 

“So, to repeat myself, I felt that I had to sneak in here and let you know some of the things I’ve discovered.” He leaned in close; Gerard smelled of the death that came in hospitals. Stiles knew that smell. It barely disturbed him as he quietly snarled. “I know what you did. I know it was you who handed those bastards the bomb. I know you promised them money once they got out of jail. Good news for your bank account, though. They won’t be in any position to collect it very soon.”

Something else other than anger entered the old hunter’s eyes. 

“But since you are well on your way to your long over-due checkout time, I thought I would stop by to drop some relevant information for the trip.” He moved even closer, so his mouth was inches from Gerard’s ear. “I know enough now; it is just a matter of time. I’m going to bring him back, and he is going to have a very long and very happy life. I _swear_ it. I want you to think about that while you are playing tonsil-hockey with Theo in Hell.” 

He stepped back and kept his eyes on the decrepit old monster’s face. “You have a sweet set up here. If I know medical equipment – and I do – this is top-of-the-line stuff. Look at that positive-flow ventilator with an embedded monitoring system – such a beauty. It would be a shame if something _happened_ to it.” He brought his hand out from behind his back, clad in one of the Dread Doctors’ focusing gloves. He wiggled its fingers at Gerard. “Good night and go fuck yourself, you old bastard.” 

It took him less than a minute to disarm the nurse’s alarm and disable the ventilator. He had made sure that none of the security cameras would have the slightest trace of his presence. He paused only once at the doorway to the room to see if he felt guilty for what he had just done. Nope, he decided, not even a little. He had killed monsters that were not half as bad as Gerard Argent.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Thinking back, I could be pretty thick. Beacon Hills is like the freaking Vengeance Channel – all revenge, all the time. Peter, Matt, Jennifer, Noshiko. They didn’t do what they did for power or money, and I didn’t understand them. On that day, sitting in that courtroom, I realized that she hadn’t just summoned it because people she loved were in an open grave next to her. She summoned it because of the injustice that she saw and felt and tasted -- that the people who had done so much wrong were going to get away with it. I finally understood what she felt; what they all felt. “
> 
> “You may know this, but it’s a different type of pain, Dad. We’ve talked about it, that when people you love die or you kill someone, you feel you’ve lost a part of you, and you don’t get it back. But injustice? It’s different. You feel something is wrong with the whole universe. It’s not that you’ve lost something, but that you never had it in the first place. It doesn’t go away with time. It festers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is longer than the others. I just couldn't find a place to cut it. It is also the place where things get really dark.

**November 17, 2018:**

Deputy Stilinski came into his father’s office. “Hey, Sheriff, what’s up?” When he first started working there, he and his father developed a system to keep conflicts of interest to a minimum. When the badges were on, they were ‘sheriff’ and ‘deputy’ and when they were off, they were ‘dad’ and ‘son.’ It had worked pretty well so far in the ten months he had been here. Stiles hadn’t realized how much police work would settle him. He hardly ever got into trouble, if you didn’t count his late night extracurricular activities.

“Take a seat, deputy.” His father had that serious tone in his voice. Stiles wasn’t surprised. He knew what this had to be about already, but he didn’t want to let on that he did know. 

“Uh-oh. Am I in trouble?” He went for the easy laugh. This was going to be a very delicate situation, and, honestly, he did not want to lie to his father. He had to, but emotionally, he had been there, done that and he was so over it.

“I hope not. You know, Charles Bell was paroled last week.” His father was studying his face, and when he didn’t see what he was looking for, Stiles could see the hope bloom in his eyes. The sheriff wanted this to be over, but it could not be over. Not yet. Stiles knew his father was looking for guilt, and he did not have any. 

“I know, Sheriff.” He did know, and he knew that if he claimed he hadn’t, his father wouldn’t have believed him. 

“He’s disappeared. No one has seen him for forty-eight hours.” 

Stiles nodded calmly and replied: “Okay. Well, who is going to investigate me? Do you need my gun and badge?” His father immediately tried to protest against that; he did not want Stiles to think he couldn’t trust him. “Sheriff, come on. I have method and motive. I have to be on the list of suspects. So, who do I talk to?” 

“Yeah. It’s best if I take them. Ryerson is going to talk to you. He is waiting in the spare office.” The sheriff’s voice was sad. He wished his father was not sad so often, but he now knew that was the price you paid for what the careers they had chosen. He wished he could have understood it better when he was a teenager, that part of being a cop was a more than casual acquaintance with disappointment and sadness. It wouldn’t have stopped him from wanting to follow in the sheriff’s footsteps, but he would have understood his father a little better. 

Stiles took off the gun and badge and put it on the desk. He affected nonchalance, but he was sick inside about the deception he was performing. “See, not a problem. I like Ryerson anyway.” 

His father looked at him sharply. Maybe the performance hadn’t been as great as he thought. “Do you have anything to do with this? Do you know anyone who would?”

Stiles smiled easily. “Sheriff, I really shouldn’t talk to you, if you aren’t involved in the investigation, without my union rep present. I might be willing to talk to my dad, though.” He pointed at his father’s badge. His father nodded and then took it off.

“You know me, Dad.” He couldn’t share the truth, but that did not mean he had to lie. “You know I can talk your ear off, so that’s what I am going to do. I am going to tell you a story, and it’s a good story. It’s even got a moral.” 

His father frowned but nodded once more for him to begin.

“Remember the day that Bell and Dudek were sentenced? I know you do. You were there in the courthouse, and I was sitting next to Melissa. I was holding her hand. Bell and Dudek were sitting there at the table and the lawyers were doing lawyer stuff. It seemed so incomprehensible, and I understand it now, but I didn’t understand then. I was a little bored.” He took a deep breath. “But then Bell turned around and he smiled this huge smile. He nudged Dudek so he would turn around and he smiled as well. Both you and Melissa thought that they were smiling at me; Melissa nearly broke my hand, she was squeezing it so tight. I swear, Dad, you were this close to shooting them. I know you thought about it, but you didn’t, because that’s not you.” 

“I could barely breathe, but I suddenly got the feeling that they weren’t looking at me. They just were looking near me. So I turned around, and guess who had just walked into the court room a few seconds before?” Stiles let it hang for a second. “Gerard Argent.”

“Son of a bitch!” His father exclaimed. 

“I did not tell you then, because I knew that you would immediately know what I knew then. That old bastard had supplied them with the bomb, and he had probably come to the trial to remind them about their deal, whatever it was. Remember the remote control bomb that we couldn’t figure out how Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee managed to make, let alone operate? Remember how we wondered how their lawyers had managed to find a list of people who they could call for witnesses in case we went for the murder conviction? Honestly, I should have thought of him first. So, seeing that geriatric bastard in the room put it all together. So you know what I did then?”

“You never told me, I know.” The sheriff was reproving. It was the old tale between them – the things left unspoken.

“I know, but I am not sorry, because I really didn’t want to tell you what I was thinking in that moment. As you well know, sometimes I was like other teenagers and sometimes I wasn’t, due to a greater range of life experiences, I suspect.” He winked, but it wasn’t meant to be a joke.

“The first thing I did was forgive Noshiko Yukimura.” He laughed, grimly, at the memory. “You see, I always blamed her, in part, for everything that creature did, even as it wore my face. I blamed myself, of course, but she summoned it first. She brought it here and then she trapped it in the Nemeton, so I could find it again after all those years. How could she have done that? Done something so terrible? I know death. You know I know death. I know what it takes from you. Someone you love dying or someone you love being close to death isn’t a good reason to hurt or kill others.” Another memory surfaced, of a fight in a hospital hallway. Had he always been such a hypocrite? 

“Thinking back, I could be pretty thick. Beacon Hills is like the freaking Vengeance Channel – all revenge, all the time. Peter, Matt, Jennifer, Noshiko. They didn’t do what they did for power or money. I didn’t understand them. On that day, sitting in that courtroom, I realized that she hadn’t just summoned it because people she loved were in an open grave next to her. She summoned it because of the injustice that she saw and felt and tasted -- that the people who had done so much wrong were going to get away with it. I finally understood what she felt; what they all felt. “

“You may know this, but it’s a different type of pain, Dad. We’ve talked about it, that when people you love die or you kill someone, you feel you’ve lost a part of you, and you don’t get it back. But injustice? It’s different. You feel something is wrong with the whole universe. It’s not that you’ve lost something, but that you never had it in the first place. It doesn’t go away with time. If festers.”

The sheriff broke in. “All police officers who care about what they do feel that the world is wrong, but then they realize that they’re the ones who are supposed to fix it. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t wonder – what if we had closed the case on the Hale Fire? What if we had caught Mr. Lahey’s pattern of abuse earlier? What if I had made sure Julia Baccari got help after she survived? I shouldn’t do that, though, because you can’t play what-ifs.” 

Stiles looked down at the top of the desk. “But you weren’t them. You didn’t have the power to do what they could do. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? Power. If you could hold the people responsible, wouldn’t you want to? I’ve seen you come home and drink, and now I know why.”

Stiles took a large breath and then exhaled. “To continue with my story. The second thing I did was make a wish. It did not come true, but I wished it with all my heart. I wished that I had a wooden box in my hands and there would be a fly in that box and I would open it, and then those three monsters would die quietly, but only because they couldn’t scream any more. And you know, for the next couple of weeks, I would dream of that box, but I never had the chance to open it, because I didn’t know where Isaac had taken it. But if I had known, I would have damn well tried to get it.”

He sat there quietly for a few more minutes, after that confession. His father watched him from across the desk; there was really nothing to say. 

“So. So, the moral of this story is: Don’t ask questions for which you are not prepared to know the answer, Dad.” He stood up. “Dinner on Sunday?” 

He went to find Ryerson. He knew he was going to cooperate with the detective. The police could search his house, his car, trace his movements, but they couldn’t tie him to Bell’s disappearance. Unless Ryerson was secretly supernatural, and even then the detective would have to be very lucky. 

After all, his plans had only gotten better with age. And now he had _power._

 

**November 20, 2018:**

 

Stiles stood in a basement of an abandoned house on the outskirts of the city, south of the Preserve. It still had light and water, which was necessary for what he wanted to do here. It was also situated on a secondary conjunction of the telluric currents, which was just as necessary. He was sure that the Darach would have used it if there hadn’t been an actual family living in it at the time. Well, her loss was his gain.

It had a finished basement and he had taken his time transforming it into the laboratory he wanted. Unlike the Doctors, he actually appreciated good lighting. He flexed his fingers in anticipation. Tonight was an important night. 

“Chuck,” Stiles said to the man restrained on the table. “Can I call you Chuck?” 

Charles Bell could only grunt in response, as he was gagged. It had been difficult making sure his captive had been able to eat, drink, and got to the restroom over the last four days. Stiles wasn’t a monster. Not yet, anyway. 

“It seems that your term in prison may have confused you. Moving your head up and down means ‘yes.’ “ He demonstrated both gestures. “Moving it from side to side means ‘no.’ So, can I call you Chuck?” 

Chuck shook his head vigorously. 

“Thanks, Chuck!” He hopped up on the table next to him. He was not concerned if the man should somehow get loose of his restraints. This had become one of Stiles’ places of power. He could fight a Beta werewolf here, physically. He had more strength, more speed, and more endurance at this junction than any human being could ever have.

“So, Chuck, and I understand that this is going to be a one-sided conversation, but that has never given me any pause for as long as I have been alive. We have a lot to talk about, and I am afraid that I have only a certain amount of time. You see, the reason we are here tonight must happen when the moon reaches its zenith. That is in about fifteen minutes, so I have to get a move on.” 

“So. I guess you are wondering why I have brought you all here tonight. Well, we are going to reveal the murderer!” He laughed to himself and then glanced down at the captive. “No? Not even a nod? Try to keep up, Chuck!” Stiles hopped off the table and headed toward the other table, higher than the one on which the prisoner was restrained and covered with a tarp. “Want to guess what this is, Chuck?” He tapped it. 

Chuck, it seemed, did not. 

Stiles pulled off the tarp and revealed a coffin. It must have been buried at one point; even cleaned, there were traces of grave dirt all over it. Chuck’s eyes get wide. 

“Oh, it’s not for you, Chuck. It is the reason we are here tonight, you and me. You see, this is the coffin of the man you killed. I don’t mind telling you, Chuck,” he repeated, saying the bound man’s name with greater and greater vehemence, “it nearly killed me to get it here, physically and emotionally. Getting you was a lot easier.”

Stiles seemed about to continue and then put a hand to the side of his head. “My god, I’m monologuing!” He laughed for a minute or so. “But this is cool, because now I know why the villains do it. It isn’t just to be understood, I see. It is a sort of pre-villainy pep talk. I guess some people have to talk themselves up to committing mayhem. Tell me, Chuck, did you and Kaden give yourselves a pep talk? ” 

Chuck just shook his head. He was afraid now. You could tell it in his eyes. 

“You didn’t? It was all business then.” Stiles affected a serious expression. “Did you think you were professionals? Was it easier to pretend you were doing a job?” He looked at his prisoner then. “You know, this is going to be boring if you don’t attempt to make an answer.” 

Charles Bell just stared at him. 

Stiles sighed. Every time he spoke his captive’s name, it was harsher, sharper. “Chuck, I keep thinking that I should remove the gag if I want to get a real conversation out of you. I mean while this is fun, I think I want some feedback. How am I doing? Am I sufficiently scary? Are my pop-culture references registering? You should get to say something now, I think. Did he ... ” He jerked his head over toward the coffin. “... get any last words?” 

Charles Bell’s eyes shifted back and forth between Stiles’ face and the coffin. 

“Chuck, Chuck, Chuck,” chuckled Stiles, but then he leaned forward, the mask of joviality slipped, and he roared into the captive’s face. “I ASKED YOU A QUESTION. Did. He. Say. Anything?” 

Chuck nodded vigorously. There were tears in the man’s eyes. They had no effect on Stiles, at all. He’d seen plenty of tears.

“I am going to undo the gag now, Chuck, and the first thing out of your mouth better be what those words were. I can most certainly tell if you are lying.” 

Stiles removed the gag and the terrified man choked out: “Please, don’t.”

Stiles whirled as if he had been struck by a hard blow in the face, though no force had touched him. The ghosts pulled back, disintegrating under the strength of what he was feeling. He believed that he would have been prepared for anything, but he hadn’t been. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t look at the prisoner, but he did bite his lip so hard that he drew blood. He reached up with a hand and wiped it away. Without turning around, he continued in a cold voice. “Chuck, I’ll give you a chance. If you can keep repeating those two words, I might, _I might_ stop what I am about to do.” It was a lie. Nothing would stop what was going to happen.

“Please, don’t.”

Suddenly, Stiles returned to his previous jovial banter. “But I didn’t show you my mask yet! I want you to understand how much effort I put into this.” He retreated to the back table and opened a case, pulling out a full-face mask. It would cover his entire head and a single pair of eye holes that lead into darkness. It was made of a single piece of wood, carved with symbols and traced with lines. 

“Please, don’t.”

“The original people who made masks like this used leather, metal, glass and all sorts of bits of things that you really don’t want to think about, Chuck, but they were pursuing a different form of power than I am. Their masks shifted their existence slightly out of phase with our own. They existed partly outside of the world and partly within it. Not the healthiest of existences, but it gave them a great deal of power, which they needed. My mask is different. It doesn’t shift me outside of existence; it intensifies my connection with one part of the world – namely the telluric currents that flow through the earth. That is because of how I made it.” Stiles turned the mask around in his hands. 

“Please, don’t.” 

“I carved it from a single piece of wood taken from a Nemeton. Know what that is, Chuck? No, you probably don’t. But what I did, it isn’t easy. I’m quite proud of myself. Using it, of course, isn’t without its risks.” He looked down at his prisoner. “I have a darkness around my heart, and it is that darkness that ties me to the Nemeton and to the currents on which it grows, and it is that darkness that I draw upon when I put on the mask. But, just like my predecessors, drawing on it gives me power.” 

Charles Bell can see that there are tears in Stiles’s eyes as well. All he can say is: “Please, don’t.”

“I agree; it is creepy. I am not the same when I put this on.” He nodded in imaginative agreement with his captive. “But I’ll cope with that, if it does what I need it to do. And what I am going to do is murder you, Chuck, even if it works the way I hope. Oh, wait, not murder – voluntary manslaughter you to death. ” Stiles slid the wooden mask onto his head.

The moment he did so, the world began to change. There was no eruption of sparks from the lights above, no flickering as if things were blinking in and out of existence. However, everything but Charles Bell, the table he was strapped to, the casket on the other side of the room, and Stiles himself, began to bleach. Silently, colors faded into white while objects kept their differentiation, until the entire room was white on white on white. What was once frightening and disorienting to Stiles was now well known, as the power he now controlled merged a spiritual plane of existence with the physical it connect to. There were no more doors. Stiles heard noise like the cracking of ice during the spring thaw behind him, and he knew that the Nemeton had pushed itself out of the floor of the basement. Charles Bell’s eyes were panicked, though he observed that with detached indifference. The voice that emerged from the mask was still his, but it had been hollowed to be devoid of emotion and timbre. “Let us begin.” 

Stiles examined the corpse after the process finished and the worlds had once again separated. Physically, the changes were minimal; only the eyes and the jaw line had changed. It made sense that the most recognizable features would be the first imprinted on the subject. It was impossible to see if the mental changes took place; there had been too much pain to perceive any coherent mental state. And, worst of all, there was not the least sign of spiritual transference. Channeling that power had taken a lot out of him, and even though he knew that the chances would logically be terrible for the first attempt, it left a bitter, ashen taste in his mouth. He spit out his verdict -- the only verdict there could be -- with utmost contempt.

“Failure.”

**& &&&&&**

Stiles blinked with exhaustion; it was well after midnight, but there was still one more thing to do. It was so hard to focus after he took the damn mask off, but he knew the disorientation would pass in time. He drove the jeep to the Nemeton, taking the most circuitous route he could navigate. No one knew this, but ever since he had first worn his mask, he could always find the stump with no difficulty. Even worse, he now found he could feel it in the back of his mind all the time; all he had to do was think about it.

A small price to pay, he thought to himself. While he had been bitter and angry immediately after the conclusion of this first experiment, he realized that the resurrection ritual had actually produced real, tangible results. It was a step forward, and he knew that patience was the only sure path to success. 

As he struggled to get what was left of Charles Bell out of the back of the jeep, he was so tired he had to check to make sure he was still wearing gloves. If what he thought was going to happen tonight did not happen, he would have to make sure he got rid of the body in such a way that it couldn’t be traced back to him.

He had barely dragged the corpse to the Nemeton when a figured emerged out of the woods behind him. In the light of the full moon, he could tell who it was. Stiles let out a breath in relief. “Hey, it’s Sparky the Fire Dog. How you doin’, Sparky?”

“What are you doing, Stiles?” Parrish was already transformed, with glowing eyes and a fanged mouth. He had not yet burst into flame. 

“You know damn well what I am doing.” He was too tired to be jocular, but he took a deep breath anyway. He was aware that there was a possibility that he was about to die. “After all, you knew what I was going to do before I did.” 

“That door should not be opened. You should let what is, be.” The hellhound stopped barely ten feet from him. 

Stiles closed his eyes. “And yet, the door has been opened so much in the last few years. ” With great exaggeration he held up fingers. “Peter, Tracy, Josh, Corey, Hayden, Sebastian. And that’s counting those who were totally and most completely dead. You only seemed to get upset about one of them. ” He heard movement and he opened his eyes to see the hellhound approaching Charles Bell’s body. “At least I cleaned up after myself.” 

“What you are doing is against nature.” He pulled the body up onto the Nemeton itself. “You have to stop.”

Now, Stiles was angry. “Against nature? Have you looked in the mirror? And you didn’t answer my question. You fought against La Bete, but you did not lift a hand against the others.” He swallowed. “Are you going to make me stop?”

The hellhound began to burn, taking Charles Bell with it. “Not yet. You belong here.” 

Stiles burst out into laughter and then took a couple of heaving breaths. “Whatever. I’m going home.” He stalked off to the Jeep. His information was sketchy on hellhounds. He would have to do more research. Werewolves and all the other creatures he had met seemed to have a degree of free will. They could choose what they wanted to be, for good or ill, in the world. But the hellhound spoke as if it was here for very specific purposes, and more and more, it looked like one of those purposes was to stop him from doing what he needed to do. If true, that would be unfortunate. 

Because that meant he’d have to destroy Jordan Parrish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always imagine Stiles nicknaming Parrish "Sparky the Fire Dog." I don't know why, but it shows up in multiple works of mine.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It is not the resurrection you want to stop. It’s me; the warnings were for me. And I can understand that. I’ve been going on a pretty big supernatural tear, and I am not even thirty. Also, I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” Stiles smiled sadly as the ghosts around him nodded in agreement. “If I get strong enough to do what I am going to do, you must be worried about what else I could end up doing. Why wouldn’t you be? I’ve always denied it, I've refused to believe it, but I know it was part of the reason I was chosen by that fox. I have a thing about breaking rules.”

**December 26, 2018:**

To Stiles, there was one time that was the best of all the good times of Christmas, no matter whether it was Family Christmas or Pack Christmas. It was that time after the dinner is eaten and the dishes cleared and the presents opened and all the little things that had been planned had been done, when everyone was still happy but a little fuzzy and a little tired. A warm contentment filled the house and the people in it. Not every Christmas benefited from this special feeling, but it when it did come, you had to cherish it. You had to make it special. Even if it was at Melissa’s house, which he had always tried to avoid. 

His dad and Melissa were sitting in the kitchen, talking about the past in low tones. He could not hear them, but he knew that his father was sneaking more pie and that they had an open bottle of whiskey between them. They would not drink too much, but he would still drive his father home himself. He could see them in his mind’s eye talking and smiling and maybe with a few tears in their eyes. Christmas could never be completely happy for them, not anymore. They had never started dating; Stiles came to realize that their friendship was all that they needed from each other.

Hayden, Liam, Malia and Abbie were playing cards on the living room floor; it was Hearts, a game that he had never ever played. Abbie was Liam’s first beta; the pack had come to know her over the years. She was a charming girl with blue eyes and mocha skin, quiet but also kind. She had raised her younger brother and sister while going to school, as her parents were there but hopelessly in the grip of drug addiction. Liam had watched her struggling with all that responsibility, and he had offered her the bite as a way of having something for herself. Liam had run it by Stiles first, as emissary, and then by the pack. He explained it to them in this way. “She was tired all the time, but she wasn’t going to quit. She wasn’t going to abandon her responsibilities. I want to give her the strength to keep doing that.” It had worked out so far. 

It seemed that Hayden was kicking ass at the card game, so much so that Liam was mockingly accusing her of cheating. They were no longer a couple, but they had become good friends. Hayden was an independent, strong-willed woman, and the strain of Liam being the alpha had put an end to their romance. She finally admitted to herself and Liam that she couldn’t be in love with someone who could demand her obedience, especially if his superiority was mystically enforced. They did choose to remain friends with benefits. She had told Stiles that if she was still single when she wanted to have children, she wouldn’t have any problem with Liam being the father. Stiles had been happy to tell her that this was common practice in packs. 

Stiles was not shocked that Liam had become ‘friends with benefits’ not only with Hayden but also with Malia and Abbie. Liam had come to him and asked if it was strange that he didn’t feel he needed to date or be exclusive at all. He had all the affection and sense of belonging he wanted with his family and with the pack. Stiles had reassured him that it wasn’t an indication of something wrong. Instead, Stiles had begun teasing him that what was actually wrong was the goatee; he threatened to come over there with a wash cloth and wipe it off. In truth, it made Liam look older and more mature; Stiles didn’t want his pseudo-little brother to grow up too fast.

Malia laughed out loud at Liam’s grumbling at Hayden’s Hearts domination. Of all of them, she was the one who had become the most fundamentally happy. She had a job as a waitress, and she loved how she got to talk to people all day. She still lived with her adopted father, and she loved how they had come to be with each other. She liked everyone, and she did little things to show that she liked them. Stiles, for instance, she would drag out on nature walks for the hell of it. Stiles envied her happiness but only a little bit; he remembered what she told him about her liking things being simple. 

Mason and Corey were on the couch, working on programming the new phones they had got for Christmas. They were still together, but only when Mason was home from college. He was in an engineering program out east, while Corey was studying cooking of all things at a local college. Tonight, there was no stress between them, but it wasn’t always easy. Mason instinctually understood the underlying insecurity that motivated Corey, and even Stiles had to admit that he liked Corey a whole lot more when Mason was home. 

Stiles had started to teach Mason, when the college student was home and had free time, the basics of being an emissary. It might be a good idea to have a spare for when his project was completed, as many people might be very, very angry with him. It would not do to leave the pack without someone to advise it.

Stiles smiled and pushed thoughts like that away for now. The lights of the tree and the mistletoe above the doorway had banished the ghosts outside, though he could still see them when he looked out the windows. He had something far more important to do tonight, in the warming glow of a Merry Christmas. “More cider, Lydia?”

She was sitting with him at the dining room table. “Don’t mind if I do.” She had been telling him about the politics of the Stanford mathematics department, where she was working busily on her doctorate.

He poured her a drink. “They’re no match for you,” he said, and he laughed. He knew it to be true. He could imagine others in her department being as talented as her, but he couldn’t imagine any of them with the surety that came from the experiences she had survived. “But, that brings me to something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Lydia smiled. “Leading off with flattery is a good start. What do you have in mind? Nothing too serious?”

“Unfortunately, it is serious. Quite possibly dangerous. And most likely there will be times when it will be tedious. Luckily for you, it is also totally optional.” He affected the most bored and uninterested tone he could manage. “I have this long-term project that I really would like to work on with you. I kept thinking about it, and there isn’t anyone who is a better match for it.” He held up his hands. “And I promise it will never interfere with your school, or your career, or your ‘me time.’ I wouldn’t want you to change a single thing that you’ve got planned. It can be flexible around your needs.”

Lydia laughed. “Oh, God, Stiles, finish the pitch and get to the proposition.” He knew that she liked it when he was wordy. As time had passed, his skill with words had transformed from defense mechanism to diplomatic tool. He also liked making her smile. 

With a smooth motion that he had practiced for the last week, he slid off the chair and dropped down to one knee. “Lydia Martin, would you marry me?”

He knew this was going to be a public scene, because, of course – werewolves – but he also heard a chair scoot in the kitchen. Everyone was a witness. If she said ‘no,’ things were going to get awkward in a hurry.

Lydia paused. “Stiles, I trust there is a ring somewhere?” 

Now, he flailed. He hadn’t flailed in years, but he had forgotten to take out the ring and frantically pulled it out of pocket. It was unveiled. 

She inspected it and then decided to have a little fun. “Now, if this project is to go, I have some conditions. First, I am in charge of the wedding, living arrangements, and house decoration. You have the taste of a cocker spaniel. Second, in case you and I disagree over the direction of the project, I have the final say. Third, there shall be no mention of children until I am ready.” She began to smile. “Acceptable?” 

“Absolutely! I wouldn’t have it any other way. “

“Then I accept. I do have some free time on my schedule.” She then pulls him into a kiss. 

The wolves and coyote suddenly break out with a strange whooping noise in appreciation, and there are cheers from the chimera and the humans. There may or may not be some dad- and surrogate-mom-tears in the immediate vicinity.

Yeah, he thought. This was a nice Christmas.

 

**March 6th 2019:**

 

Sarcasm can be a pitifully insignificant defense against a universe that just does not give a damn. The year had started out in such a positive manner. There had been no trouble, and he was going to get married in May. Lydia had declared June weddings unimaginative. The phantom army was content staying in its winter quarters. Of course, that meant something bad would happen. Screw regression to the mean.

“Unit Five, this is Home. We have a car accident at Wembly and Route 7. Possible fatalities. Please proceed.” 

Stiles picked up the radio. “This is Unit 5. On my way.”

The dispatcher came back on. “Unit One advises you that this is chessboard.” 

“Acknowledged, Home.” He flicked on his lights and put on speed. ‘Chessboard’ had become the code word for those situations where things were either obviously supernatural or might be supernatural. Everyone in the department knew that meant that his father, Parrish, or he should be sent to those locations. 

There were two other deputies present at the scene: Wilson and Parrish. The intersection was not one of the busier ones in the county, so they’d be able to keep gawkers and passers-by to a minimum. The paramedics and the ambulance were already there. 

Parrish came up to him the moment he parked the car. Relations were frosty between them, but they both acted professionally on the job. “Stiles, Jeremiah Cranston lost control of his truck when he entered the intersection and t-boned a Highlander. The SUV was pushed right off the road.”

“What’s the chessboard?”

“It was Corey’s car. He and Mason are in it. It’s pretty bad.” Parrish was tense and unhappy. “I can’t get close. Corey starts screaming whenever he sees me, and the paramedics have to work.”

Stiles swallowed. If Corey was panicking at the sight of the hellhound, it must mean he’s terrified that Parrish had come for him again. “I got it. Run interference.” 

Stiles scrambled down the side of the road to where the vehicle was sideways, held up by two trees. He was not prepared for how bad it looked. The paramedics had just cut the unconscious Mason out of the car and lifting him onto the stretcher. Stiles grimaced as he saw the damage they had to contend with, but there was nothing he could do about it right now. Corey was still in the driver’s seat. He was breathing heavily and covered in blood, not all of it his own. 

“Corey.” He needed to get the chimera’s attention. “I need to know how badly you are hurt.” He whispered it low in order not to draw the attention of the paramedics. 

Corey was dazed and incoherent, even this long after the accident. That was not good. “Where’s Mason? Where’s Mason?” He lifted his hands and groped toward him; they’re covered with blood. 

“He’s being taken to the ambulance. Corey, you need to answer me. Can you move your legs?” Stiles slowly went through a list of the rest of the body parts. Corey was mostly unhurt, but Stiles could not tell if that was due to luck or healing. It could be tricky when dealing the chimera, as they still don’t know from what he was made. He whispered a command as strongly as he could. “You need to focus like I taught you and not heal anymore. Can you do that?”

Corey mumbled again and Stiles placed a hand on the center of the chest; the touch brought the younger man back to awareness. “Corey, can you do that?” There was an affirmative but shaky nod. “They are going to take you to the hospital. Do what Melissa says, okay?” 

He stayed with Corey until the second ambulance arrives. He kept physical contact until they load him into it and then, once they’re gone, he immediately calls on his radio. “This is Unit Five. Scene is secure; victims are en route to hospital. Can I get a status on the first victim?” 

“This is Home, Unit 5. First victim coded on way to hospital.” 

Stiles closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them, he went back to his car. He told Wilson, the first responder, that Parrish and he would finish the site cleanup. It was two in the morning, and there was nothing but residences on these roads for miles. The wrecker wouldn’t be here, he estimated, for another hour. Plenty of time to do what needed to be done. 

Parrish was standing by the side of the road, looking sadly at the Highlander on its side in the ditch. He had his camera out and was taking pictures of the scene for the report. He had always been conscientious with those report. 

Coming back from his car, Stiles walked up towards and called out his name. When Parrish looked up, he shot him in the heart with his back-up weapon. Loudly, he observed “I really, really like pop culture.”

Parrish staged and fell back on the ground as he continued to talk. “I think that in season two, episode twenty-two of the West Wing there was a great scene. President Bartlett is walking in the National Cathedral, and he’s angry because his long-time secretary was hit and killed by a drunk driver the day she bought a new car. He gives this really powerful speech against the fecklessness of God. To quote it: ‘What? Was this supposed to be funny?’ Sorkin’s a great writer, so I am going to steal it.”

“What? Was this supposed to be funny?” Stiles says this to the gasping deputy on the ground. “We save him from being consumed by centuries-old French werewolf so a kindly old farmer having a senior moment could whack him? The powers you serve need new writers though. There was not enough build up for that punch line.”

Stiles knelt on the ground next to Parrish and opened up his shirt shirt. He wasn't shouting, he wasn't sneering, but there was an edge to your voice. “As you can probably tell by now, that wasn’t a normal bullet. It is one I made specifically for you.” He looked at the wound, even as it starts to smoke, starts to heal. “I wonder if this was supposed to be a lesson. I wonder if the universe just fridged the perky black sidekick to teach the conflicted white boy a lesson. That’s pretty damn racist, man.” 

He stood back up. “I see the bullet took. Good.” He turned around. “Maybe this didn't mean anything, and it was a stupid pointless accident. Another stupid, pointless accident in a world filled with stupid, pointless things. That is what would you have me believe, wouldn’t you? Come on, get up, Sparky. I know it's uncomfortable, but you are a big dog now.” Stiles watched the tree line as the ghosts began to pour out from under the eaves. The newest recruit was already there. “That was fast.”

“What did you do to me?” Parrish was more puzzled than angry.

“I put my bullet in your heart. You see, I figured some things out, but I wasn’t willing to risk it until something motivated me to try." He shouted at the sky, "Something like this stupendous clusterfuck!”

Stiles went back to explaining. “One of the things I figured out is that I can’t actually destroy you. Even if I gunned you down and melted you in a vat of acid, a hellhound will just reform as long as there is a reason for it do so. It just wouldn’t wear the shape of Jordan Parrish. I kind of like knowing where you are, guardian. So, I decided to bind you instead.”

“Bind me?” 

“I tied my power to that bullet and I tied your existence to that bullet. Think of it like a fail safe. You move against me, and I will draw your animating force into it. You’d exist, but be unable to move on to another host body. That body would cease to move as well. It wouldn't be a very pleasant existence.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to use it, but I will. Mostly because I've figured something else out.”

Parrish did not say anything. Stiles suspected that the deputy had always done most everything on instinct, so he could not really comprehend what Stiles was saying. Perhaps Parrish knew better than to doubt his certainty.

“It is not the resurrection you want to stop. It’s me; the warnings were for me. And I can understand that. I’ve been going on a pretty big supernatural tear, and I am not even thirty. Also, I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” Stiles smiled sadly as the ghosts around him nodded in agreement. “If I get strong enough to do what I am going to do, you must be worried about what else I could end up doing. Why wouldn’t you be? I’ve always denied it, I've refused to believe it, but I know it was part of the reason I was chosen by that fox. I have a thing about breaking rules.” 

“Deaton and Morrell always made such a big deal about maintaining the balance, and there were times that I thought it was all just bullshit. But it isn’t. What if bringing him back isn’t enough for me? What if I just keep pushing against the rules of this crappy world? There has to be a limit to how far I can bend the rules, before something really important breaks. Will I be able to see that limit? By that point, will I care? There is a possibility, with enough determination, I could break even death – Stiles Stilinski, source of the Zombie Apocalypse.” He once more laughed sourly at that. "That would be kinda cool."

Parrish glowered at him. “This is serious.”

“Right then, so let’s be serious. Your fear or your masters' fear, they don’t mean anything to me. I won’t let them stop me, and now, you can’t stop me. So, we are going to be friendly at work, because we were actually friendly once. You aren’t going to talk to anyone about this. And after I do what I have to do, I am going to release the spell on the bullet.” He nodded. “And then you can do what you think you have to do.”

There wasn't much more to say after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter I had written completely before I decided to post the story. I will post more, but they may take a while. As always, comments are welcome!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Melissa reached out with her hand to place it on his knee and comfort him, but he caught the hand with his own. “Please, don’t.” He let her hand go and she withdrew it. “But that wasn’t just the reason, because it wasn’t just about you; it was about me. I was scavenging.” She winced at his words, so he went for black humor. “I thought to myself, why, look at this, here’s a perfectly good Mom that no one is using any more so I could just slide right in there …”
> 
> “Oh, Stiles.” It was meant to be comfort and a rebuke for thinking like that.
> 
> “I’m not a good person, Melissa. I’m a bad person. The only reason I have you guys thinking I’m a good person is because I’ve hung around with great people. They lift me up to their level. That’s why I’m here. I needed …” He choked. “I needed to feel like a good person, and Dad’s busy at work.”

**April 27, 2018**

He had been sitting in the dark until he heard the car pull up in the driveway; it was Melissa McCall coming home from second shift at the hospital. The house was so quiet; he could hear the door open downstairs. He had left the lights off in the house, so he imagined her flipping on the light as he heard the keys clatter on the table. He heard the refrigerator door open and close. He heard her pursue an average night in an average life with the familiarity of repetition. He marveled.

When he had entered the house earlier that evening, the room he now sat in had been empty. He had borrowed a chair from down the hall. He remembered how Malia’s father had kept her room as a shrine, but Melissa had emptied the room completely. He did notice that she had never used it for anything else. He noticed that she barely dusted in here; he had sneezed when he first came in. Stiles did not blame her.

Several ghosts kept silent vigil with him. They were annoyed because they had to sit on the floor. “Oh, don’t give me that,” he had muttered at them. “You don’t need chairs.” 

He listened to her eat dinner, watch some television, and put away the dishes. He listened to her come up the stairs and head towards her bedroom. She almost missed him as she walked past. Maybe it was the glint off of his badge that gave him away. Maybe she could just sense his presence in her house.

She was startled and it looked like she was going to shriek, but then she realized who it had to be. “Stiles?” She called out this softly. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“I have a key.” He raised his key ring and showed her. “I’ve had it for a very long time.”

She turned on the light in the room; he had been content in the dark and his eyes smarted from it. “You didn’t answer my first question.”

“There isn’t an easy answer to that question, Melissa.” He said in a tired voice. “I had to go somewhere and this was the only place I could go. It is kind of creepy stalkerish, so I am going to apologize. I’m sorry for breaking into your house in the middle of the night.”

Melissa didn’t say anything; her face fell into that open empathy where she understood without saying so. He wondered if it was genetic. He wondered if she would ever run out of it or if it was inexhaustible. She must have been tired from work and probably scared about his behavior, but she came in and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor. Stiles couldn’t come up with a reason not to do the same, pushing the chair back and sitting across from her. They stared at each other for a few minutes.

“It’s been nearly five years.” He broke the silence. “I still don’t know what to say to you. Isn’t that pathetic?”

Melissa shook her head in response. She smiled at him, offering him comfort. He knew damn well why he didn’t know what to say to her.

“It’s been nearly thirteen years.” He repeated. “I still don’t know what to say to Dad.”

“What is this about, Stiles?”

“I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you why it may seem why I’ve been avoiding you for the last few years. Actually, I wanted to tell why I have been avoiding you for the last few years.” He looked down at the floor between them. “Actually, I don’t want to tell you why I have been avoiding you for the last few years, but I should tell you. And telling you why I have been avoiding you for the last few years will effectively conceal the real reason I am here.”

Melissa was so used to his tricks that it wasn’t funny. He would have to get some new ones. She waited.

“I want you to know it wasn’t guilt. It wasn’t completely guilt. There was guilt involved, but not the type of guilt you are thinking it was.” He takes a deep breath. “The type of guilt you were thinking of I do have, but it had nothing to do with why I was avoiding you. Back then, after it happened, I thought that I might, you know, spend some more time with you, so you weren’t alone. It was silly, really. Why would you want to spend time with me, when all I’d do is remind you of what you lost.”

Melissa reached out with her hand to place it on his knee and comfort him, but he caught the hand with his own. “Please, don’t.” He let her hand go and she withdrew it. “But that wasn’t just the reason, because it wasn’t just about you; it was about me. I was scavenging.” She winced at his words, so he went for black humor. “I thought to myself, why, look at this, here’s a perfectly good Mom that no one is using any more so I could just slide right in there …”

“Oh, Stiles.” It was meant to be comfort and a rebuke for thinking like that.

“I’m not a good person, Melissa. I’m a bad person. The only reason I have you guys thinking I’m a good person is because I’ve hung around with great people. They lift me up to their level. That’s why I’m here. I needed …” He choked. “I needed to feel like a good person, and Dad’s busy at work.”

Before Melissa can process that fully, he continued. “I’m getting married in a little over two weeks.”

“I heard,” Melissa responded. “I got an invitation.”

“I’m thinking maybe I should cancel it.” He said offhandedly, which is code for he was tearing himself up about it. “Before it is too late.”

He could see that Melissa felt confident now. She was thinking it was just wedding cold feet. It was, but not for the reasons that she was thinking. “And what does Lydia think about it?”

“Lydia thinks I have grown. I have overcome the tragedies and the horror of my high school years and learned how to handle myself in both worlds. That I am confident young man who knows what he wants, and what he wants is her.” He shrugged. “She’s half right. I want her. I want her so bad I can’t stand it, and if I let myself be the selfish cruel person that I am, I would marry her without thinking. Because I haven’t learned anything. I haven’t overcome anything. I’m thirty seconds from the abyss and digging my heels in.”

Melissa knew he did not want her to touch him, but she instinctively reaches out a hand, but she doesn’t make contact.

“Mason was twenty-one, and the nicest person I have ever met. I was beginning to think he was smarter than me as well. He was going to be an awesome Emissary; Deaton 2.0 without the annoying obsession with being mysterious and obscure. He was strong. “ Stiles slapped the floor with dust coming up. The ghost at the window was almost blushing. 

“Honey, that’s how things work. You can’t let it eat at you.” 

“It’s how it works for you,” he snapped. “It’s not how it works for me. I thought, I always thought that if I kept the people I care about to a small number, I could protect them or that it would hurt less. But it just makes it hurt more. If my Dad died, I would tear the sky apart. If Lydia died, I would burn the Earth to ashes. I’m not exaggerating.” 

He went on but he could no longer look at her. “Lydia’s going to hear death coming; that’s her gift. She deserves someone who isn’t so obsessed with it. She deserves something better than an obsessive freak.”

“Stiles Stilinski.” Melissa broke out her Mom-Voice. It’s like an an Alpha Voice, only more powerful. “First, what Lydia deserves or does not deserve is up to Lydia. You don’t get to decide what she needs or what she wants. Second, you are not an obsessive freak.”

“You don’t know that.” Stiles spoke with confidence. There was so much she did not know. The ghosts agreed with him, anyway. “You realize I haven’t used their names. Not hers. Not his. Not since. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me you cared. It tells me you still care. You came here to feel like a better person. Do you think that Claudia would want you to throw away a chance for happiness? Would Scott? No. So, what you need to do is let yourself be happy. It doesn’t matter if you are the best person in the world or the worst person in the world, you get one life. You know more than anyone else that it could be over tomorrow. You have to take a chance to make life worth it. I don’t regret anything, no matter how short it was.” Melissa put her hands together. “You can’t let death take everything.”

“No.” He realized that she was right on many different levels. There were some levels that she wasn’t aware of being right. She deserved more. “No, I can’t.”

**May 11, 2018**

Stiles watched Liam watching the most recent supernatural nuisance villains pick up their assorted limbs and limp their way out of Beacon Hills. Stiles knew they were something called vodayanoi – some type of river fae – not that he gave a damn about them. The intervening years hadn’t stopped the Nemeton from calling out to others, but the intelligent ones, which meant those that were truly dangerous, understood that you just didn’t wander into Beacon Hills without a plan. Liam and he had built a network of alliances that gave them enough power to handle even the worst intruders. Resolutions like this, where the invaders scrambled out of the city with their tails (if they had them) between their legs, were common.

Stiles was watching Liam because, as usual, he couldn’t get over the difference being alpha had made for him. Mostly, it was the height. He swore that Liam grew a foot in beta form, and he was at least eight-feet tall in alpha form. Stiles had only seen such an increase in size from Peter, though he would never tell Liam that. 

He was also watching Liam because as much as the young alpha tried to be like his predecessor, he never could match the same dedication to non violence and mercy. The river fae’s departure was being hampered by the number of them dealing with broken bones. 

Liam realized that Stiles had been watching him. “Sorry, dude. I didn’t want to make you miss your bachelor party.” 

“Don’t mention it. I didn’t want a bachelor party. I’m pretty sure that Deputy Hinman was going to bring strippers even though I said specifically I didn’t want strippers. Man. Strippers.”

Liam chuckled, but his heart wasn’t in it. He scowled at the slowly retreating fae; his eyes flashed red.

“You okay, boss?” Stiles gave Liam that title when they were being informal. “You seem a little grumpy.”

“I should have killed their leader. He – or she, hell if I know – didn’t seem very cowed by the defeat.” He snarled. “I don’t want them coming back. Someone could have gotten ...”

“Liam,” Stiles began. “They agreed to leave and not come back. Fae may be pains in the ass, but they always agree to the letter of pacts. We won’t see any of these particular fae again.” 

Liam growled once again and kicked at the dirt. The fae nearest to him limped a little faster. 

“What’s the matter? You usually aren’t this … bloodthirsty.” 

“Don’t you ever get tired of people coming to take what is yours? Don’t you ever get tired of waking up in the middle of the night and asking yourself, what’s out there that wants to kill me? Do you, Stiles?” He growled. “I know I am damn tired of it. Maybe if I make it hurt to try, less people will come.”

Stiles knew this territory; he knew its population. “It was a car accident, Liam. It wasn’t a conspiracy. I’d tell you it wasn’t your fault, but you know that.” 

“Does it ever stop?”

“I am told that for some people the pain subsides; I’m told it becomes like a phantom limb. You’ll forget he was ever there and then you’ll find something in your room or see something on the street and it will be like a spike through your chest." 

“Is that how it is like for you?” Liam asked hopefully.

“No.” Stiles sighed. “If you want to pay the world back for what it did, I’m the last person who is going to stop you. Just make sure that’s what you want your life to be.”

“I didn’t want my life to be anything.” Liam laughed. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I’ve just kind of been reacting since that night on the hospital roof. Sometimes, I think what my life would be like if Scott hadn’t bit me, but then I remember – oh yeah, street pizza.”

Stiles looked at him with alarm. He had never said anything like that before. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“Why are you apologizing?” He laughed. “You know, I was really, really scared after I became alpha. I thought that I was going to get everyone killed. I thought I was going to be the one to kill someone; I’d lose my temper and just shred them.” Liam shrank down back into human form. Now he looked like some bad-boy lothario who wore too much Drakkar Noir. “I actually lay in bed and wondered if I should kill someone just to get out of the way; anything to stop being afraid.”

Stiles had not known that. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t need to. You were already there. You had a few weeks to yourself and then you were just there.” He smiled. “I couldn’t have done this without you. Did I ever say thank you?” 

“Well.” Stiles was flabbergasted. “You’re welcome.” Sometimes when you were so involved with your own problems, you forgot that other people had problems. “We can’t get to my bachelor party, but at least you can go buy me a drink. I’m going to need it.”

**May 12, 2018**

Lydia looked at him. “You missed your chance at strippers to fight off evil fae. That was your one chance. No more strippers, ever.”

“I’ll survive somehow.” He felt light and happy, mostly because he was looking at her and she was joking with him. His talks with Melissa and Liam had shaken him out of his … whatever that was. Dark period? Depression? He knew he was not 100%, but he also knew he never would be. Even though Lydia was in the room and that meant the ghosts had retreated behind the walls, he knew they were waiting. Lydia had that knack; she kept the army at bay.

“So, you called me here when you know our wedding is tomorrow. I have eight million things to finish off and I have to keep Mom and Dad separated.” She was playfully exasperated. He knew she already had everything ready. She was just nervous. He was making Lydia Martin nervous.

“I could help you with those things. I have like nothing else to do with the rest of my life.” He smiled. He loved smiling at her. He had to buy Melissa McCall a necklace or something big and gaudy. If it hadn’t been for her, he would have called this off and he would never have felt this.

“Stiles.” She was now getting close to real-exasperated.

“I have to talk to you about our vows. I need to make a change to them.” He offered. “This is important.”

Lydia did the come-on signal with her hand. “I’m waiting.”

“I promise in the vows never to have any secrets from you. I have to change that to not having any secrets but one.” He swallowed. He had thought about not telling her about the need to keep a secret from her. 

Lydia sobered up and looked at him. “One secret?”

“I swear, Lydia, that it is just one. It is a big one. Huge. Important. I have to keep it from you for now. I thought about it and thought about it, but I can’t give it up. I can’t share it. Not yet.” He looked down. “Given everything that has happened, I’ll understand if you want to cancel.”

“Well, you haven’t given me much time.” She frowned but he could tell she really didn’t care about the wedding preparations. “It’s important to you? So important that you can’t tell me?” 

He nodded. “I wish I could.”

“Then don’t.” She kissed him. “You’ll tell me when you are ready.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not far from the pavilion there was a little glade that looked right over the lake, set with benches; it was supposed to be some form of lover’s getaway. She was waiting for him there. He knew that one of them would be in the forefront; he was unsurprised by who it was. 
> 
> “Hello, Allison.” They never spoke to him unless he gave them permission to speak. “In a bridesmaid’s dress. Nice touch.”
> 
> She turned to him, looking exactly as she would have looked if she had been the Maid of Honor. “You can stop now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a difficult chapter to post. I alternated between thinking it was fantastic and thinking it was absolute garbage, mostly because I wasn't sure about the Stiles and Lydia relationship. Please give feedback.

May 13, 2018

 _Is it possible to die of happiness?_ Stiles wondered. _No, seriously, is there a point where you are so happy arteries burst in your brain and you just fall over dead. I need to know this, as I am quickly reaching happiness levels of dangerous proportions._

“So, by the power given to me by the state of California and in the eyes of God, I now pronounce you married. You may embrace each other.”

Stiles felt giddy. He felt sixteen again. His body was no longer sixteen, thankfully, so he managed to kiss Lydia without accidentally punching her in the face. He could even imagine he looked romantic as the wedding party applauded. He could even imagine he was an impressive guy as he looked down into her face and saw her approval. 

Of course, once they broke apart, he turned to the full wedding party and gave an achievement flail. For the sake of, you know, _consistency_.

In the movies, the period of time between the ceremony and the reception passes quickly and uneventfully. They ignore wedding pictures, which take forever and make waiting for assistance at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles feel like an amusement park. Stiles didn’t care. He felt he could stand for hours with his arm around Lydia’s waist. He knew it wasn’t going to be hours, because Lydia Martin was Lydia Martin. She managed the entire process from her central location; overruled her mother and the photographer when they suggested extra pictures; quieted crying children with a glare. The whole agonizing spectacle took a little under an hour.

Now it was time for the reception in the beautiful pavilion, which, as Stiles remarked to Lydia, could not have come too soon because he was starving. Lydia rolled her eyes and left to change from her wedding dress to her reception dress. “If you think I’m going to take a chance of someone spilling things on this dress,” she observed as she departed, “you are far too crazy to have married me. Try to keep people entertained.”

Stiles nodded dumbly in response, even though she could not possibly see him. He wandered around the pavilion in a daze; he felt euphoric and unable to focus; if he hadn’t known better, he would have assumed he’d gotten a concussion. Eventually, he ambled over to where his father was standing with a big grin on his face. “Does this feeling ever go away?”

Bittersweet emotions passed over his father’s face, and in response the sheriff clapped his hand on Stiles’ shoulder: “Not if you’re lucky.” 

Stiles rewarded that with a beaming smile, but then, remembering Lydia’s instructions to him, resumed his circuitous route through the reception. People he knew and those he barely knew congratulated him; he saw people who he hadn’t seen in years: Derek, Braeden, Danny, and even Jackson. In the rush of the event, he forgot that there were people here to see him. Before he could pay those people a visit, his paternal grandmother snatched him into a hug. Mawmaw Stilinski had a great deal of advice on how to treat his wife. He listened attentively, but if he pulled one-tenth of that stuff on Lydia, she’d string him up.

After being a dutiful grandson, he made his apologies and moved away to deal with what may be a problem, escaping with a peck on a cheek. He noticed that his in-laws were setting themselves up for a situation. They are whispering each other, but the whispers are sharp and climbing ever so slowly towards shouting. Stiles readied the Old Stilinski charm; Mr. and Mrs. Martin had a tendency to go at each other any time they were in each other’s company for more than fifteen minutes. He didn’t want them ruining Lydia’s day – correction -- their day.

Lydia’s father was grousing as he gestured toward the table where the bride and groom were going to be sitting. “All I am saying it is damn strange. You couldn’t talk her out of it?”

Natalie held onto her smile but it was one of those knife-smiles, one meant to cut rather someone else. “I stopped being able to talk her out of things her senior year. Can’t you just let it go? How they run their wedding is their business.”

“Mom! Dad!” He popped in; he knew exactly what they were doing. And he knew what he was doing, for calling Mr. Martin ‘Dad’ would cause a quick separation. “How are you doing? I can’t tell if you are, but I’m starving. All that standing around and binding yourself forever to one woman is hungry work.”

Natalie gave him a thankful smile; she had grown accustomed to his humor. “It’s been beautiful, Stiles. We were going to go find our seats. Lydia should be back soon.” Lydia’s father, who never, ever liked him and never even tried to understand his humor, moved away quickly after a grunted acknowledgement. 

Stiles rested his hand on her arm. “Natalie, don’t let him bug you. This is just as much your day.” He had grown to like Lydia’s mom, even though they had little in common.

“He’s just looking for reasons to be upset. You know …” She gestured toward the table at the head of the reception. There were places for the Bride and Groom, and there were places for the Best Man and the Maid of Honor.

“That was Lydia’s call, and I support her. Have a great time, and save me a dance!” Stiles knew that many people must have noticed that there had been no Best Man or Maid of Honor during the ceremony. The whole thing had actually been Lydia’s idea, though honestly, Stiles had had no idea who he could possibly ask to be Best Man if he needed to. He still didn’t have that many friends. 

He remembered the fight between Natalie and Lydia. Natalie had called the honorary place settings morbid, and Lydia had responded with shade and the observation that she was morbid. Lydia had won the fight.

He circled around the room. There were people there whom he hadn’t seen in years, but he suddenly felt awkward and unsure of himself in their presence. But this was his day; they were here to see him and Lydia. 

He approached Derek, sitting with Braeden and their daughter Talia. They spoke about what they had been up to for the last couple of the years. They spoke about the past. As the conversation went on, Stiles could feel the words just slipping away – they were trivial, totally irrelevant. He felt panic well up his throat unbidden. When had this happened? When had they become … acquaintances?

Stiles kept a smile plastered on his face and a quip on his lips, but he realized exactly what had happened to his relationship with Derek. There were four people whom he had learned to open up completely with – one was dead, one he had just married, one was his Dad, and the last was Derek. Derek was still the person he had learned to trust, to open up to. In fact, with the aid of the bundle of rabid cuteness that was Talia, he was even more approachable, more stable, more happy. It was Stiles who had changed. A distance had appeared. 

The conversation became so banal that his head began to hurt, but luckily Lydia reappeared in her reception dress, looking like she hadn’t been on her feet all day. He left Derek with a few words and rushed to her side, the details of the conversation he had just had slipping away. He hugged her, his grip so tight that she immediately felt something was wrong and asked him wordlessly.

“I missed you.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He had felt the terrible weight of years for a second and he knew that she could dispel it, at least for a time. He’d find a way to repair his relationship with Derek, to make it real again. He promised that to himself. She believed him, because why wouldn’t she believe him, and they start with the dinner. He needed a distraction and a way to get back to the feeling he had before.

Instead of the Best Man giving a speech, Lydia had decided that Malia would give a speech. It was hilarious for everyone but Stiles. Malia, always quick to learn, had long ago caught up on the etiquette of being human. She had also mastered humor, because in this speech, she pretended that she had regressed to just-turned-back-to-human Malia and gave a rather exhaustive account of Stiles’ sexual practices. While the older people were scandalized (and a lot of them didn’t get it) everyone who did get it lost their complete shit. Stiles enhanced the whole skit by turning a bright fire-engine red. 

“I’m soooooo sorry,” he whispered to Lydia.

“Stiles, who do you think helped her write it?” She laughed back and kissed him hard. 

Stiles needed this humiliation; it drove all other uncomfortable thoughts from his mind. It was a celebration once again. After the toasts, which were sweet, it came time to dance.

Lydia had selected the music; she had been clear that every song would be able to be played twenty years from now and not be an embarrassment. Thus, the first dance was a song that Stiles did not recognize. He knew he was a terrible dancer, but he gave it his best shot anyway. With the way she looked at him, he knew he had not blown it. In fact, the awkwardness was part of the charm. It was perfect.

“Well,” he laughed as he spun her around the floor. “At least we know you didn’t marry me for my moves.”

Lydia smiled back at him, with just a hint of mischief in her eye. “Why do you think I did marry you?”

“Because I was the stalkeriest stalker in the history of stalking?” He admitted. It was something he had come to recognize about himself.

Lydia’s reception dress was shorter than the wedding dress, so he wouldn’t get footprints all over it, though he hadn’t stepped on her feet yet. “Eh. I’ve seen worse. Matt, for instance. But yes, you were a stalker, but I didn’t marry you for that.”

“Was it my creepy, possessive behavior – the ten year plan?” He screwed up his face to give the impression he was thinking hard.

“Try again!” She laughed. 

“My matchless social skills – so good that Jackson Whittemore was easier to be around.”

“Jackson wasn’t that bad,” she teased back. 

“I am running out of ideas, here, Lyds. I’m panicking. I’m assuming that it wasn’t for my earning potential.” He bent down and kissed her cheek. “But you know I do love you, right?”

“Yes, obviously. I married you because you were a creepy, possessive stalker with no social skills. And now you aren’t. Do you know how many people never change, Stiles? Do you know how many high school boys stay high school boys until they retire? You changed, and you didn’t change for me.”

“I’m not exactly the greatest catch, Lyds. I can feel confident saying that since you actually said ‘I do.’ – no takesies backsies.” He knew he would always flush when he remembered he said that at his wedding and he wasn’t drunk. “You’ve seen me at my worse.”

“And I’ve seen you at your best. It’s good enough.” 

Stiles picked her up and spun her though the air. That frothy feeling surged through his veins again. 

“When did you get so strong?” She asked, innocently.

“Your love makes me as strong as ten men,” he stated with a false voice that might appear in a potboiler romance. “And there’s a minor current under the pavilion.” He winked at her; he had explained to her that he had learned to harness them a little bit. 

Too soon, the dance ends, and then as custom demands he has to dance with Natalie while Lydia dances with the Sheriff. He really wanted to dance with Lydia all night, but he knows that there will be night after night after night for that. He sighed. Patience had never been his strong suit.

It is not until the reception enters its fourth hour – some people have already called it a night – when the toll of the day begins to weigh heavily on him. Even Lydia is beginning to look glassy-eyed. Stiles, on the other hand, was jumpy. He knew what he had to do. He leaned down to speak to her. “Let’s start bringing it down. I’ll see you in the room.”

Lydia looked at him with understanding. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to get some air.” He kissed her light on the forehead. “It’s just been a long day, and I need a moment before …” He waggled his eyebrows at her. 

He needs to be alone. The pavilion, which is a favorite marriage venue in Beacon Hills, overlooks a small lake. It was actually on the same lake as Lydia’s family’s lake house, where they will be staying tonight. Most people will drive there. He was going to be walking back to the lake house, because he knew that what came next had to happen, and he needed to make sure he was alone. 

Sure enough, he had not gotten more than one hundred feet from the pavilion and into the forest before the first of the army appeared. They did not approach, but peeked out from behind the trees. He had been so surrounded by the people he loved all day that he could feel the anticipation; they were jealous.

Not far from the pavilion there was a little glade that looked right over the lake, set with benches; it was supposed to be some form of lover’s getaway. She was waiting for him there. He knew that one of them would be in the forefront; he was unsurprised by who it was. 

“Hello, Allison.” They never spoke to him unless he gave them permission to speak. “In a bridesmaid’s dress. Nice touch.”

She turned to him, looking exactly as she would have looked if she had been the Maid of Honor. “You can stop now.”

“Oh, I can, can I?” He slid his hands into his tuxedo’s pockets. “Because I have what I’ve always wanted?”

“There is no such thing as fate,” she stated with kindness. “There is no occult conspiracy. There is no hidden enemy. God doesn't make cars crash and you know it.”

“So that’s it? That’s what you think this is?”

“Your mother died because she was sick. I died because a demon stabbed me. Scott died because my grandfather hired men to kill him. Mason died because an old man hit the gas pedal instead of the brake.”

“So I’m supposed to be okay with it?” He snarled. “I know what you are.” 

Allison kept looking at him with that stupid understanding look on her face.

“You aren’t actually ghosts. You’re memories. For everyone else, when they lose people, they grieve and they move on. Eventually, they begin to forget. Things like the exact shape of the face, or the sound of the voice, or what their favorite episode of M*A*S*H was. That’s why people take pictures and make home movies. But it’s actually good for you – to forget how someone made you feel. I’ve seen it.”

He walked past Allison’s ghost and put his hand on one of the oak trees. “I don’t get to forget. Not sure why, but I haven’t forgotten a single detail of anyone. I remember my Mom better now than I did at thirteen.”

“It’s part of being alive, Stiles,” Allison reminded him. “It only hurts because we cared.”

“Of course. Do you see Charles Bell or your grandpa among them?” He gestured to the masses of ghosts hiding in trees. “I don’t care about those two bastards, which is why they aren’t in the army. I know everything you are saying, because, ultimately, I’m the one saying it.” 

“Then stop. You don’t need to do this.”

“Of course,” he laughed. “I’m not going to do this because I need to. This isn’t some mental break down. This isn’t some obsession. I could stop right now. I don’t have to take another step.” He whirled on her. “There was always a reason I rejected Peter’s offer in the parking garage. I knew that if I had power, I would do things that I shouldn’t. I have power now, and I am doing things that I shouldn’t. If I had more power, I’d bring every single one of you back to life, but I will never have that power, but I will do what I can.”

Stiles pointed at her. “You know what makes a person a villain? The choice to do something that they know is wrong. People lose the ones they love all the time. That doesn’t mean they get to hurt others or break laws just to feel better. I know this, but _I don’t care_. You think that I don’t understand that what I am doing is greedy? That what I am doing is selfish? That what I am doing is twisted? I do! I just don’t care. I _will_ have him back.“ 

Allison whispered to him as she retreated back into the forest. “You’re not the bad guy, Stiles.”

“Is that so?” He hissed back. “Look closer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "God doesn't make cars crash and you know it.” This is also a quote from the West Wing's episode "Two Cathedrals."


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles gave McCall a glare from where he was standing. “Was that a question?” 
> 
> “ _This_ is a question. What do you want me to do, Stiles?”
> 
> “I want you to come with me, first of all. While you’re with me, I’m going to show you the truth. I’m going to show you everything. You’re going to find out the real reason your son died.” He pointed toward the door. “After I’ve shown you that, I’m going to ask you for a favor. A big favor. And I am pretty confident that you are going to want to do it.”

**July 15, 2018**

Stiles was so very glad that he had never accepted anyone's offer to take the Bite, because if he had, there would be blood running through the streets of Beacon Hills. His reign of terror would never end if he was capable of feeling as he was feeling now; he was so angry at this point he couldn’t move. He felt that if he moved, he would not stop moving until someone or maybe a lot of someones were broken. Instead, he stared at his computer screen and at the report upon it and just seethed.

He was looking at the official request for Kaden Dudek, who had been released from prison six days ago, to be placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The document argued that given that the pervasiveness of his victim’s criminal ties, the fact that there had been no other convictions for members of that organization, and that Charles Bell’s disappearance had never been solved, Kaden Dudek was in immediate and significant danger. Since he was a potential witness to organized criminal activity, the recommendation had been approved. The initial request was signed by the Sheriff of Beacon County.

His father had once promised him that he would burn the whole sheriff’s station down to protect him. It had just become obvious that he wouldn’t stop there; he’d burn down his friends’ reputations to do it as well. His hands were now tied. Any formal request for information about Dudek coming from this office would be flagged. Stiles couldn’t risk using official channels to get information.

Even worse was that WITSEC could place Dudek anywhere in the United States, from Alaska to Florida. Since he had not yet discovered the means to fly or teleport, he would have to figure out a way – even if he somehow found his target – to travel there and back without anyone noticing he was gone, so he could have an airtight alibi for that time period. With Bell, he had been relatively close by; Stiles had driven there, waited until he was alone, knocked him on the head and then driven back. That would not work this time.

Finally, even if he successfully managed to find Dudek and snatch the killer without anyone being the wiser, the U.S. Marshals wouldn’t just give up. They would come to Beacon Hills looking for a criminal organization tied to a five-year-old murder. They wouldn’t find any such thing, but they might find a pack.

His father had done this. His father had found a way to give Stiles every reason not to pursue Dudek, while simultaneously protecting the secrets that needed to be protected. Stiles cursed at himself. He should have lied when his father had asked him about Bell, but he had wanted to stop lying to his father about everything. So instead, he had told him a heart-felt emotional story that had essentially confessed to the disappearance without actually confessing to it. “I should have kept my big mouth shut,” he said aloud.

“What’s that, deputy?” Somehow his father was standing before his desk. 

Their eyes locked over the top of the computer monitor. Stiles knew that his father could feel the anger radiating off of him; the sheriff knew that Stiles knew. There was wordless communication between them.

“Oh, nothing. I’m fine. Just some trouble at home.” Stiles lied, smoothly and without conviction. His father wasn’t fooled, and he didn’t expect his father to be fooled. It was just as good a lie as the one where he said he had been out in the woods alone.

The sheriff decided to play along. “That happens. Always apologize, even if you’re right. Especially if you’re right.” His dad played this whole disaster off as a joke. 

“Will do.” They could survive this. After all the strategic silences between them, what was one more thing not to talk about?

Stiles understood his father’s message loud and clear. _Leave it alone. You have far too much good in your life to risk it all on revenge._ He didn’t understand, and Stiles realized by this point he would never be able to make him understand. He also knew with the same certainty that Kaden Dudek wasn’t going to enjoy his new life somewhere else with the money that an old deceased bastard had squirreled away for him. This punk killer had a higher purpose for his miserable life, and nothing short of the end of the world was going to prevent Stiles from helping him fulfill that purpose.

Stiles had the ‘why.’ He just had to figure out the ‘how.’

 

**July 22, 2018**

_This is a terrible idea,_ Stiles told himself. He was sitting in the middle of the floor of a darkened apartment wearing as nondescript clothes as he could scrape together out of his closet. He had a bag next to him with everything he needed: focusing glove, lock picks, a burner phone, and enough cash to get him where he needed to go. _This is such a terrible idea._ He sighed. _But it’s the only idea I’ve got._

The apartment would actually have been pretty nice if the occupant had made any effort to keep it that way. It was certainly a bachelor’s apartment. It hadn’t been dusted in months, apparently, and there were no decorations to speak of. The renter must be aware that a nice apartment in San Francisco bespoke status, but after that, he couldn’t be bothered to do much else with it. The supply of liquor bottles also spoke volumes to anyone used to this sort of thing; someone was indeed drinking again.

Stiles was never very patient, but he had estimated that he shouldn’t have to wait for too long. He was sitting in the middle of the floor to avoid leaving trace evidence on the couches. Maybe it was paranoid, but he couldn’t predict what was going to happen when the renter of the apartment got home.

Finally, the door opened and the lights clicked on. Keys were thrown down on a table along with a briefcase. A man entered the living room and stopped, stunned, as he saw Stiles sitting in his living room on the floor. 

“Hey, Agent McCall. Long time, no see.” He offered him a little wave.

To his credit, Rafael McCall only gaped at him for maybe thirty seconds. “Stiles, why the fuck did you break into my apartment?”

“I needed to speak to you,” Stiles stood up. As much as he needed the man’s help, he couldn’t keep the derision out of his voice. “I need to speak to you privately, with no evidence that we had ever spoken.”

McCall studied him. “This apartment building has cameras.”

“All malfunctioning. Shoddy workmanship, I suspect.” Stiles gestured around the room. “Other than that, nice place you have here.”

As much as Stiles hated Rafael McCall, he knew that the man was good at his job. It only took him a few moments to put it together. “This is about Kaden Dudek, isn’t it?”

“Might be. It’s not so hard to understand why we both might be keeping an eye on him.” 

The FBI agent went into the kitchen. “Want a drink? You’re legal right?” Stiles shook his head but he watched the man pour himself a scotch and soda. He bit back an insult. “Stiles, given recent developments, I am going to ask – did you have something to do with the disappearance of Charles Bell?”

Stiles sighed; McCall never abandoned his direct questioning shtick, even though the deputy must have proved by now that it did not work on him. “If I had something to do with Charles Bell’s disappearance, which I am not saying that I did, I certainly would not say something that would confirm it to another officer of the law.”

McCall walked back into the living room. “No, you wouldn’t.” He sat down on one of the couches. Stiles noticed that his temples had gone gray. “Your father’s request for witness protection. It wasn’t to protect Dudek. It was to protect you.”

Stiles gave McCall a glare from where he was standing. “Was that a question?” 

“ _This_ is a question. What do you want me to do, Stiles?”

“I want you to come with me, first of all. While you’re with me, I’m going to show you the truth. I’m going to show you everything. You’re going to find out the real reason your son died.” He pointed toward the door. “After I’ve shown you that, I’m going to ask you for a favor. A big favor. And I am pretty confident that you are going to want to do it.”

They had left McCall’s apartment separately but taken his car to the Eureka Valley neighborhood in San Francisco. It was a three-story condo in very good shape. Stiles whistled; this place would run over a million dollars easily on the market. “It’s good to be bad.”

“Who or what are we here to see, Stiles?” McCall demanded. 

Stiles got out of the car. “You’ll find out. Hurry up. It’s going to start raining any moment and I don’t want to track water in, even if we are showing up unannounced.” He walked up to the front door. “House is registered to Benjamin Smith. Not particularly inventive, but then again, they never were particularly good at improvisation.”

The knock on the door is answered relatively promptly. He’s wearing a beard now and it does not look good on him at all, but one might do all sorts of unattractive things if one is trying to get lost.

“Stiles.” The man in the house took a deep breath; he had recognized Stiles immediately. “What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Ethan. Or should I call you Benjamin now? No ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ or ‘You look great?’”

Ethan frowned. “It’s been six years. What did you expect? And if you want something, why did you come to me? I’ve put all that behind me.”

“It’s not what you can do for me, Ethan. I didn’t like you and you didn’t like me. It’s what you can do for him.” Stiles gestured to the FBI agent behind him. “This is Rafael McCall. He needs to know the truth.” 

“There are others who could tell him the truth,” Ethan immediately understood what this was about, but Stiles knew exactly why Ethan had wanted to put everything behind him. The past was the past; only it wasn’t, not for Stiles. And if Stiles didn’t get to move on, neither did Ethan. 

“Yes, but I happen to care about them.” Stiles sounded jovial, but he wasn’t. “I could get mean if I wanted, but I don’t want to. I need to do this. You need to do this.” 

Rafael was getting impatient behind him, wanting to ask questions. Ethan relented and let them into the oh-so-tastefully appointed living room.

“This doesn’t seem your style, Ethan,” Stiles observed. He wasn’t trying to be mean; he wasn’t. Only he was, because he was pretty sure Ethan had indeed moved on. The twin had no ghosts to keep him company. He should have at least one, like the one Stiles could see lurking in a doorway that led deeper into the house. Stiles didn’t want that one; he should belong to his brother. 

“It’s not. It’s Duke’s.” The former alpha shrugged. “I just live here.”

Rafael was beginning to steam, so Stiles had to move this along. “I don’t need much from you. I just have to tell Mr. McCall here the truth, because I need to tell him the truth about what happened.” Stiles gestured. “And there’s always that undercurrent of disbelief that makes this so difficult to explain. Visual aids are important.”

“Why me?”

“Because you were in San Francisco, and the others can’t find out about this. Ever.” There was a threat in his words. “Show him, and I’ll be out of your life once again.”

So Ethan did. Rafael, to his credit, did not panic. He narrowed his eyes as if he was filling in the blanks. It took like thirty seconds. 

Ethan transformed back into human. “I’m sorry about your son. He was … a very good person.”

Rafael startled. Stiles smirked; the agent had almost forgotten what this was about, which was not surprising. Disappointing, but not surprising.

They got back to the car before the rain came down. “It makes sense. Tell me the rest.” Rafael McCall was a self-centered prick, but he wasn't slow.

“Telling you the rest would take weeks. I only want to tell you what you need to know.” Stiles took a deep breath. “Right before the second semester of our sophomore year, I dragged your son out in the woods and he got bit. He turned into a werewolf.”

“A werewolf like this Ethan fellow.”

“No. Never like him.” Stiles spat out. “Your son made stupid mistakes, oh God yes. Sometimes, he was a fucking idiot. I mean, he was a total imbecile. But he was also brave, and selfless and a hero. He became an alpha; you don’t know what that means. You have no idea how strong that made him, how dangerous that made him. I do. I also know that when he had a choice, he always chose not to kill the people who tried to kill him; he always chose not to hurt the people who hurt him. He …” He took a breath. “He had this power and only tried to help, which was how they killed him.”

“I know, Stiles,” gritted McCall. “I read the arrest report. I read the confession. I also read the plea deal.”

“Did you know that ninety-five percent of the names on the defense’s witness list were supernatural creatures? It was brilliant. If we went to trial, dozens of people’s lives would be ruined or there would be a mistrial. My father knew that; the prosecuting attorney knew that.” Stiles snapped back. “You see where I am going with this?”

Rafael looked at him as if something dawned. “This was a conspiracy.”

“Oh, yes. Your son was killed by two dumbasses who had never done anything like this before? Right. There was someone behind it, all right. This person was a human monster who enjoyed cutting people in half, who ordered mass murder, who stabbed your son in the gut with a knife, who supplied Dudek and Bell with the bomb, and with the witness list, and with a half-a-million dollars each, waiting for them to get out. A cruel vicious asshole that your son spared twice.” Stiles snarled. “Don’t worry about him though; he had an accident. A _terrible_ accident.”

“This is capital murder.” Stiles wasn’t sure whether Rafael was talking about the plot against his son or the barely disguised confession that Stiles was making. He didn’t care.

“Damn right it was capital murder, but there wasn’t a single way I could prove it. Not without destroying the lives of innocent people. And these bastards knew that.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t even prove a link between the murder and the money, though Charles Bell did disappear before he could get his hands on his share.”

The FBI Agent snapped back. “If you had told me this …” He shook his head. “We can’t try him twice for the same crime, but …”

“This isn’t about a trial!” shouted Stiles. “This is about doing what’s right. There is no way to punish these people in the normal courts.” 

Rafael shook his head. Stiles knew what he was thinking about – all the other people who had thought the way he was thinking. He didn’t understand; Stiles had to make him understand. “I know …”

“You don’t know anything,” Stiles hissed. “But you should. I watched you try to make up with your son. You tried so hard to make amends for what you think you did. You were succeeding, but then they took it away from you. You read the coroner’s report yes? The part where the bomb would have killed the victim instantly?” Stiles dug into the bag he had carried with him. Eventually, eventually, he had managed to get copies of the crime-scene photographs. He shoved one of them in the agent’s face. “Look at this. Look at this, and let me tell you what you don’t know. That bomb would have killed a human being instantly, that’s true, but not an alpha werewolf. When Dudek and Bell got out their fire axes, he was still alive. In fact, he was still conscious. Think about that, like I’ve had to think about that for the last five years. Think about them chopping him up, while he begged them not to.”

Rafael McCall sat without speaking for minutes while the rain pounded the roof of the car. They were sitting on the side street in San Francisco talking about something that no one should ever have to face. Stiles suddenly felt sick about this, more sick than he had felt in a long time. Giving into the emotions needed to convince the other man had stirred them up in his own mind.

They sat in the darkened car when suddenly McCall shoved the crime scene photo back at him. “What do you want me to do?”

“You can do what I can’t. I know what I am asking you to do. I know what I am asking you to risk, but I am never going to get what I need without you.” Stiles actually put a hand on his best friend’s father’s shoulder. “Tell me where he is.”

Three days later, an unmarked manila envelope was shoved under his apartment door. Inside was an address.


	13. Chapter 13

**July 27, 2018**

Stiles trudged over the gravelly sand. The sun burned hot; he was already sweating and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. The light burned his eyes, and though he knew which way he was going, he didn’t like any of this situation at all.

“Stiles,” he told himself out loud, “this may be the stupidest thing you have ever done, and you once attacked Voltron Alpha with a baseball bat.” 

He should have just kept driving. He only had a weekend to get this done and get back home with Dudek. He had a pretty strong alibi, but if he ran out of time or was pulled over, things might get complicated. He had avoided hurting innocents so far, but he knew that when you were contemplating what was essentially kidnapping and murder, you had to be prepared to do what was necessary.

“So what the hell am I doing here?” He demanded of himself once again. Stiles knew he might have totally lost touch with reality when he contemplated the stupidity of coming to this place and the fact that he was talking to himself out loud.

He stopped when the sand shifted beneath his feet. He recognized that this is where they had been before; he turned around to see how far away he was from the car he had rented with a false identity. Maybe he wasn’t going to be able to see her.

He was about to turn away when the ground cracked open. Hands burst up out of the ground. Stiles had never seen this, but he’d heard the stories about it. He found it creepy but kind of cool. He also knew that this was the moment of truth; he looked down at the shoulder bag where he knew his mask was. If this went south, he might – might – just be able to hold them off with it. 

There were three Skinwalkers. He had only caught the slightest glimpse of them when they rescued Kira and Noshiko before. They could be the same three, or they could be three completely different ones. He didn’t know, and he hated not knowing. Maybe they resented that he drove the getaway jeep.

“What are you doing here, sorcerer?” The one standing in the front demanded. She seemed to be their spokeswoman, her face painted with black lines and carrying a spear made out of some sort of predator’s jaw.

So that was what he was. Well, at least it was good to have a name he could call himself. He’d been so busy researching _how_ , that he forgot to even think about _what_ he had turned himself into. 

“I … excuse me if I’m trespassing, but I wanted to know if I could talk to Kira. We haven’t spoken since she left to train with you, and … well, I don’t know if she knows things she should know.” There was no reason to lie. He had no idea if they could tell if he was lying anyway. “I know it has taken me five years, but I was coming this way …”

He hadn’t babbled like this since he had asked Lydia to marry him. They did not seem impressed.

“Kira will not talk to you.” One of them in the back announced suddenly; her hair was shorter, her face all white clay topped with a red crescent moon. Her spear tip was perhaps bronze? The echo-y voice was neither helpful nor judgmental.

“She knows of the loss you share. He held her tail.” The third one spoke. She had a band across her eyes like a raccoon, and her spear’s tip was stone. Stiles had already suspected it would create a bond between them, that gift. His right hand clenched into a fist. How terrible to know only that something had happened.

“Loss makes control difficult.” Black Stripes spoke from her position. 

Stiles muttered to himself, but he knew they could hear him. “Tell me about it.” He looked up to catch Black Stripes, eye to eye. “She knows I’m here. Well, could you tell her – tell her I’m sorry?” Part of him felt that he should go, that he should leave. “You called me a sorcerer. How did you know?”

“Breaking the rules as you have done leaves traces.” Black Stripes explained. Now that he was talking to them, he didn’t think she was the leader. It was possible, he intuited, that they didn’t have a leader. “You cannot do what you have done without consequence.”

“Oh.” He looked down at his hands. “So. Are you guys going to do anything about it?” He just did not know what to cut and run, did he? He couldn’t just shut up and leave. Was this guilt? He thought he had moved past that.

“Do you want us to do something about it?” Red Crescent readied her spear to emphasize her question.

“No. Not really. I know that Theo offended you when you heard of what he had done, and you gave Kira the power to punish him, so obviously you do care about things like that.” He stuck one hand in his pocket. “Look, I know what I’ve done; I know what I am going to do. I’m going to break the law of death to bring my friend back, and I am going to use the lives of the people who killed him to do so. I’m not going to pretend that what I am doing is somehow right for anyone but me.” He suddenly realized what the one in the back had asked him. “I guess I am feeling curious about … what the thing I am doing means on a broader scale. From everything I’ve learned, you’re more aware of the … “ He reached words. “… the Big Picture than I am. Does that make sense?”

“We could help you see it,” said Raccoon Eyes. 

“But not in the way you think. We can help you change.” Black Stripes intoned. 

Stiles was startled by the offer. “Change? Change into what? Into one of you?”

“No. You cannot walk with us. You draw upon the power of a sacred tree. We can show you how to draw even more of that power; to find the power to be one with the forest.” Red Crescent continued with the strange way the Skinwalkers had of speaking: following each other’s sentences closely like they had rehearsed the conversation. 

“You would dwell among the roots,” said Raccoon Eyes. “You would have limbs for arms and leaves for eyes.”

“You would be the Green Man,” promised Black Stripes.

Stiles had heard of that before. It was also known as the Old Man of the Forest – a powerful spirit tied to a particular forest. “Why would I want that?” He was sincerely asking them; is that what he was moving towards when he called upon that damn tree stump? Again, he had never really contemplated what his path might be doing to him.

“The Green Man knows life and death; he understands them,” said Black Stripes.

“The Army could not follow you there,” suggested Red Crescent. 

“You would have both power and peace,” promised Raccoon Eyes.

Stiles gave it some thought – about thirty seconds worth of thought. “Thank you for offering, but …. I don’t want to be a demigod. I just want my friend back, and I just want justice for his death.”

“And that is why we do not stand against you,” stated Black Stripes. 

“Do you think Theo was satisfied with what he had?” questioned Raccoon Eyes.

“Do you think that Theo would have ever stopped trying to gain more power?” demanded Red Crescent.

Stiles responded the only way he could to their interrogation, with a quiet: “I don’t know.”

Black Stripes snarled: “Neither did he.” 

Stiles got the distinct feeling that the interview was over. He thanked them once again, because he was no longer a teenager and being polite had its uses. Then he made a break for the car. He was disappointed that he could not have spoken directly to Kira, but he also had a feeling she had heard everything that was said. 

He shook his head. No, he didn’t want more power; he wasn’t Theo. Strangely, it made him feel good. 

 

**July 28, 2018**

It was a small city in southeast New Mexico, not far from the Texas border. It was an oil city but not a huge one. That was what made it perfect for a thug like Dudek to hide in. It was easy to notice strangers, but not for long. Familiarity was easily established. Soon, Kaden Dudek – or whatever name he was using – would be just another neighbor among hundreds.

Stiles stared sourly at the house from the end of the street. It was a gorgeous split-level ranch built during the heyday of the 70s oil boom. It had a lovely manicured lawn and a spacious back yard and his hatred was a blossoming rose. He had actually seen Dudek puttering in the yard, looking bored.

Stiles promised silently that he wouldn’t be bored for much longer. 

It didn’t take long for Stiles to spot the cameras. Security on the house was tight. They had made so much effort to defend a murderous fucker. “I’m a terrible cop,” he muttered. Intellectually, he understood that he was in the wrong here. Intellectually, he understood that once you served your time, you should be protected just like anyone else.

He did not care. All he had to do was wait for nightfall. 

Stakeouts were not a problem. He had done a few of them as a deputy and a few more of them as a member of the pack. He had brought with him plenty of snacks, drinks, and a book. He wouldn’t use any phones or tablets in this area just in case it could be traced. 

There was little chance that he’d be spotted beforehand. One of the first things he had mastered was the Doctor’s trick of eliminating memories. As long as he was not too blatant, people would forget they saw him parked in a car a few houses down. It wouldn’t take care of security cameras or physical evidence, which was why he was being careful.

He listened to the radio as well, and he was happy to hear that a storm was approaching from the west. The city didn’t get that many storms, so it would be a good cover. He’d take all the advantages he could get.

It was about fifteen minutes after sunset when the situation took a turn for the worse. Stiles had been watching the twilight to the west turn from layers of orange clouds to a sky the color of a purple bruise. He was going to hold off and wait for the storm to hit before he made his move, but he suddenly saw two SUVs pull up in front of the house. Two men leapt out from the first one and a man and a woman came out of the other and virtually sprinted to the door. 

“God damn it.” They had to be U.S. Marshals. Something Rafael had done had tipped them off. He wasn’t angry at McCall; if that had happened, McCall might be in danger of ending his career or even jail time. 

He frowned and slid into the heavy duster he had purchased, sliding on the Doctor’s focusing gloves and getting out the helmet. This was the worst possible scenario. He suddenly went from having plenty of time to having to rush – they could be packing Dudek up right that instant, it depended on what provoked it. 

He looked down at the mask in his lap. This was of what he had always been afraid. He would most likely have to engage the marshals physically. He would try his best not to kill them, but accidents could always happen. It would be a step that he could not take back. 

A glance out the window brought him face to face with the ghost he didn’t want to see right now. He couldn’t meet the eyes. “I know you wouldn’t approve. I know that. But you’re dead.” He slammed the mask down over his head. If he had been at the nexus of a telluric current, he would have brought the spiritual plane into the material, overlapping them as far as he could sense. He was too far away from any such current to do that, but he did have enough energy to overlay his own presence from the spiritual here. It would be hard to notice him and even harder to focus on him, but it wasn’t invisibility.

He paused for a moment and let the nausea pass. It was always difficult to look into two worlds at once. Stiles slid out of the car. He was only going to have one shot of this. He raised his hands and readied the gloves. 

Before he could move on, though, he looked up to see how far the storm was away. It was at that point that it hit the city. 

In years to come, the residents of this city would talk about the storm of 2018. It was a thunderstorm completely out of season and with an intensity of lightning and thunder that they had never seen. The storm took out power to every single building in the city and stretched into the adjacent parts of the county. The storm took out every single cell tower in the entire county for a week. The electrical discharge in the upper atmosphere was enough to disrupt satellite communications as well. In a matter of five minutes, the city was isolated, blind, and deaf.

Stiles saw something different. He could tell immediately that the storm was unnatural and guided unnaturally. The lightning strikes were tinged with wrath but the wind that accompanied it howled like a woman crying.

“What the fuck is she doing?” He asked out loud. “I didn’t realize she was that powerful.”

The ghost next to him answered. “Kitsune don’t really care much about right or wrong, but if you offend one, it can react pretty badly.”

Stiles did not waste any more time. If Kira was going to provide him with the mother-of-all-distractions he wasn’t going to look a gift fox in the mouth. He managed to get close to a back window; he made sure the security cameras were off. The next time a lightning strike hit nearby he smashed it and climbed through.

Safe from the storm, he could hear the marshals in the living room. They were discussing whether it was safe to move Dudek. While Stiles hoped they would conveniently discuss how they knew he was at risk, they did not. He moved through the house as stealthily as he could, aided by the power of the mask. 

He finally found Dudek in the dark. He was in the bedroom, packing a suitcase, in the dark. They must have decided to relocate him. “I’ll be right out,” the man grunted. “You aren’t giving me very much time.” 

Stiles walked up right next to him. Dudek was stuffing cash into the suitcase finding empty spaces between his clothes. He already had a second suitcase out. It was obvious -- he had already retrieved his blood money.

His voice made hollow and echo-y by the mask, Stiles remarked: “That’s right. You don’t have very much time at all.”

The man, who looked like prison had coarsened him into a career criminal, whirled around, only to get a backhand from Stiles, knocking him across the room. With his other hand, Stiles called the door to the bedroom to slam shut and the wood to expand outwards, jamming the door. 

He bent down and picked the man up by the throat. Why he wasn’t as strong as he would be in his places of power, he had enough energy here to be stronger than the average person. Dudek choked, his eyes growing wide in the half-dark. 

“No need to speak,” Stiles ordered. He grabbed a roll of bills and shoved it into Dudek’s mouth. “We wouldn’t want you to go without your pay.” The man kicked at him and then Stiles put a glove in his gut. “If they hear us, I’ll kill you before they can rescue, so relax if you want to live.” He put the glowing fingers of the focusing glove in the man’s face. 

The man was terrified by the implication of what was happening but he managed to keep still. Holding Dudek against the wall, Stiles waited for another close lightning strike and then blew out the window. Turning back he shocked the other man into unconsciousness. Maybe it was the mask, but he was reluctant to do see him knocked out. He liked the idea of this scumbag being terrified of him. 

Moving quickly, he tossed Dudek out the window and scrambled after. The gloves and the mask would keep physical evidence to a minimum. He carried his prisoner to the rental and shoved him in the back seat. Getting in, he drove without headlights until he was down the street before coming back and duct taping him into helplessness. He paused as nostalgia threatened to overwhelm him; how did Deaton get out of the duct tape? He’d have to ask some day.

He drove out of town as quickly as possible, even as the storm raged about him. The presence and the aid of his friend bothered him. How had she known that he would need help? Or was this just a gesture of approval? It certainly wasn’t a gesture of disapproval.

He pulled over about ten miles out of town. With the city as dark as he saw it, he probably had a little time before the marshals could start their manhunt. He had plenty of time to make it home. 

The wind gusted at him like breathing, kicking up loose sand and dirt. He walked away from the road and the car. “Kira?” He called. “Can you hear me?” 

There was no answer. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk. I know you probably heard me back with the Skinwalkers, so I am just going to say ‘Thank you.’ If you never want to see me again, that’s fine, but if you do ….” He shrugged. “I guess I owe you one.” 

“I’m going to bring him back, Kira. I am. And I hope one day you two can be together again. It wasn’t fair, any of it.” There was still no reply. “Well, I’ve got to get moving. Thanks again.”

Suddenly about ten feet from him, the largest lightning strike he ever saw hit the ground, throwing him back. He wasn’t hurt, but it was powerful. He didn’t sense it as an attack, and he picked himself up without further harm. Something was glowing in the center of the lightning pit – it was fulgurite. This mineral is made when lightning strikes the ground, sometimes. Stiles knelt down to see that its shape was familiar, like a throwing star.

It was Kira’s second tail. 

“I’ll put it with the other one,” he promised. “You can get them when you are ready.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Because, if I can’t, if there is nothing I can do against a cold and unfeeling world, then the army will grow, and it will devour me. I will spend the rest of my life in either a drug-induced stupor or in a cell next to Peter. I know it.”
> 
> Stiles reached out and brushed the hair off Lydia's cheek gently. 
> 
> “You have to know, I would never hurt you. You can do what you think you need to do. If you say stop, I’ll stop. If you go to my father, I will go with you. If you go to Liam, I’ll go with you. There is no world if I break us.” He took a deep breath. “But you have to know. If you take this from me, I won’t survive it.”

The words kept ringing through his ears, even though no one was saying them. _The body and the mind without the spirit is abomination. The body and the mind without the spirit is abomination._ The laboratory was returning to normal after full immersion in the spiritual plane where he had initiated the transformation process.

On the surface, the process had been a complete success. Kaden Dudek was no more, erased as if he never was. In place of his body, Stiles knew, there was now the body of an eighteen-year-old werewolf, healthy and full of life and bearing the features that he knew almost as well as his own features.

In place of the murderer’s mind, Stiles knew, there was the mind of that same alpha werewolf. He knew this because that mind was trying to speak around the gag that was in his mouth. The expressions on the face were the expressions that he knew. The look in the eyes was the look he knew. Stiles felt dizzy and sick. He knew that if he removed the gag and loosened the bonds that every detail would be the same. Everything would be the same. 

Stiles just stood looking down. There had been no spiritual transference at all. He had looked for it; he had prayed for it. _The body and the mind without the spirit is abomination._

Stiles was tempted to say fuck it. So, he wouldn’t be an alpha; he wouldn’t care. He had never wanted it to be an alpha. Liam would accept him, no problem. Stiles would be able to talk to him again, be able to laugh with him again, he would be able to dismiss the ghost from the army – just one. That’s all he wanted, right? 

Peter’s warning though kept echoing in his ears. He had found it in every text he had read over the years. It was a warning so strong that even the Dread Doctors had been concerned about it. The resurrected person without spiritual transference would be vulnerable to being taken over by hostile entities: ghosts, demons and other spirits. 

Ultimately, that is what held Stiles’ hand. He could imagine the conversations they would have – the good and the bad. He would endure all the scorn, all the soft disapproval, everything just to have that voice. But he knew, he knew what it would feel like if he let this go – if he let an abomination survive – and then have it possessed by something that shouldn’t have a body. 

Stiles couldn’t do it to him, especially when he could try again. He could always try again. He could figure out why the spiritual transference wasn’t happening and take steps to rectify it. All Stiles had to do was be strong. All he had to do was not give in to the temptation to hear his friend’s voice once again.

Stiles tried to focus; he tried to come to a decision. He knew what he should do, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

That is, until the expression on the tied-up werewolf changed. It was recognition. The werewolf on the table knew who he was behind the mask. 

Stiles’ world spun; the mask made it hard to breathe. He felt control of the situation slipping away from him so he reacted as he knew he had to. He put his hands over the nose and mouth of the werewolf. Even they had to breathe. 

This might be the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. He knew that the restraints would hold against everything but an alpha and with his tremendous failure, he knew that the werewolf wouldn’t be able to break free. Still, he’d fight. He’d struggle. He could hear the grunts through the mask; he could feel the body kick. He pressed down even harder.

His own breaths were getting shorted and shorted as the struggle continued. There was something getting in his face. Oh, yes. He was crying. 

Finally, the struggles stopped. With a trembling hand, he felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. He thought he was going to throw up. He thought he was going to have a panic attack. He collapsed to the floor.

Stiles threw the mask away from him, because he felt like it was choking him to death. He started repeating the words like a mantra: “The body and the mind without the spirit is abomination.” His hands clenched and unclenched.

He was so distracted by his emotional reaction that he was caught flat-footed by the scream. He looked up to the top of the stairs into his laboratory. 

“Oh, hi, Lyds.” He said, lifting a tear-stained face next to a very familiar-looking corpse. “Surprise?”

Lydia had the look on her face like she was just leaving her fugue state. She had gotten very good at understanding what was going on with her own powers over the years. Her eyes took in the room and then landed on him, before starting off into a corner of the room. They weren’t judging him, not yet. They were trying to understand. 

“Lydia, I think it is an understatement that you weren’t supposed to be here this weekend.” Stiles took a few deep breaths and gestured to the laboratory, the dead body, and the doctor’s mask behind him. “I could try to explain, but there is only one important thing you have to know. You have to understand what you mean to me, what you mean in comparison to this.” He laughed bitterly. “This was the only thing I kept from you. I had to keep it from you. You are … you are my sun. God, poetry.” 

She did not answer, but he knew she was listening, really listening, on all the levels that only she could hear. She wasn’t looking at him, though. Her eyes scanned the room and he followed them. With a sickening though, he suddenly realized that she was seeing his army of ghosts for the first time. She marked their faces, one by one. 

“You can see them,” he whispered. “I never wanted you to see them.”

Finally, she spoke. “How long? How long have you lived with them?” 

“They showed up the week he died and they’ve never left. I’ll never forget them, Lydia. I’ll always see them.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She demanded and for the first time, she was angry. “God damn it, Stiles, you keep doing this! You keep trying to hide it when something hurts you. Don’t you know I want to help? Don’t you know that I want to be the person you rely on?” She had walked down to him, shuddering at the corpse, and standing above him, radiant.

“I couldn’t, Lydia. I couldn’t. I couldn’t weigh you down with this; you’re the alchemy that turns lead into gold. You never knew this, but this is the first time you haven’t dispelled them. You do that, Lydia – only you. You are my sun.” He had to make her understand.

“But this, what I am accomplishing here, this is – this is the dirt in which I grow.” He knew his voice was growing less sweet and more forceful. “These are the roots that hold me down. This is the darkness around my heart. This is my moon, Lydia.” 

In one of the smallest parts of him, the buried remains of the teenager who walked into the woods eight years ago, he heard a gasp. _Oh my god, I’m having my Galadriel-loses-her-shit moment._ He stood up to look her in the face.

“Everything I have – our love, my family, my pack, both of my callings – depends on this. Everything I am ever going to want – everything we are going to want in our lives – depends on this. This terrible thing I am doing holds the army you see now at bay, because I have to know I can do it. I have to know that I can take back what was taken from me, just once, and it has to be him. I have to make it right; I have to make it fair.” 

“Because, if I can’t, if there is nothing I can do against a cold and unfeeling world, then the army will grow, and it will devour me. I will spend the rest of my life in either a drug-induced stupor or in a cell next to Peter. I know it.”

He reached out and brushed the hair off her cheek gently. 

“You have to know, I would never hurt you. You can do what you think you need to do. If you say stop, I’ll stop. If you go to my father, I will go with you. If you go to Liam, I’ll go with you. There is no world if I break us.” He took a deep breath. “But you have to know. If you take this from me, I won’t survive it.”

He fell silent then as she looked around the room. Her eyes took in the casket and the work table. She walked over to the mask and picked it up like it would burn her. Then, she turned to him, and her eyes were blazing. She was angry with him, but he couldn’t help but be happy. Other women might have freaked completely out; other women would have retreated to what was safe, what was normal. But she wouldn’t. She was Lydia Goddamn Martin, and she did not break for anything less than the apocalypse. 

She took a breath and centered herself. “First. When you said you had a secret you couldn’t tell me, I was imaging that you still had feelings for Malia. I never imagined you were playing Dr. Frankenstein with the help of that damned stump. So, no more secrets, or we get a divorce.”

He nodded. “No more secrets.” This time, he would keep that promise.

“Second, who is that?” She pointed at the body he had just killed. “Because I don’t want to say who it looks like.”

“That was Kaden Dudek. It was my second trial run.” He said sadly. “Just so you know, I’m also responsible for the disappearance of Charles Bell and the death of Gerard Argent.”

Lydia made a noise as if that news was unimportant. “You timed them to coincide with my conferences, didn’t you?”

“I did. The less important people are to you, the closer you need to be hear their oncoming deaths. I’m sorry; I studied your powers to make sure you couldn’t stop me.” He looks down at the ground. 

To her credit, she did not even blink at this. She is holding his mask in her hands. “You came close, didn’t you?”

He frowned and shook his head. “Close, but not close enough. Full physical transformation and mental transformation, which was a bit more stressful than I thought it would be for me. And still, insufficient spiritual transformation. I don’t know what I am doing wrong.” He quickly explained that this was possible because the alpha power still existed on this plane. He tapped his finger on the table as he contemplated. 

Lydia listened carefully. He could see her weighing the information she was given. Finally, she looked up. “What will get you to stop?”

“Why should I stop? What harm will it do, Lydia? Don’t you want him back?”

“Some rules shouldn’t be broken,” Lydia replied. “You have seen what has happened when those rules are broken.”

“This isn’t Peter!” Stiles exclaimed. “This isn’t Sebastian Valet! This is …” He trailed off.

“Someone whose name you haven’t spoken in five years,” Lydia’s voice was sharp. “You’re not being very convincing about your clarity of thinking. Does anyone else know you are doing this?”

“No one else knows, except Jordan.” He grimaces. “That’s the real reason we have been so growly at each other. He thinks I’ll go crazy after I do this – wait, he thinks I’ll go crazier.” He looked at her. “I told you I would stop if you asked me to. I promised you that, and I meant it.”

Lydia looked over the room. “Stiles. You think I don’t want to see him again? You keep forgetting that I’ve been through just as much as you.” She frowned then. “But there are other things to consider, and other questions you haven’t asked.”

Stiles was dumbfounded. “There is a question I haven’t asked?” 

Lydia, for a moment, gave him the exasperated Stiles-get-your-head-out-of-your-ass look. “For someone who has been able to break the rules between life and death, you can be pretty thick. You haven’t asked me why I came home early.”

“Uh. Why are you home early?” He took the mask from her hands. “I had just assumed that you had sensed something.”

“No. Your evaluation of my powers is correct. I didn’t care about Kaden Dudek at all. I would have been too far away to sense him. I came home, because I have big news.” She smiled at him, and it was a sad smile. “We’re going to have a baby.”

Stiles stopped. He felt a tremor in heart, like the foreboding of arrhythmia. The army of ghosts flooding about the room took a step back almost in unison. Some were happy; some were not. “We … are?”

“Now, you see why I wanted to know what would make you stop. You don’t know how this will end. You don’t, Stiles. I want you here; I want you with us. I don’t want this to take you away from us.”

“I don’t know.” Stiles bit his lip. “I don’t know if that is enough to get me to stop. I won’t lie to you, Lydia.”

Lydia stood up. “We will talk about it more at home, but I will not force you to give this up. You’ve been working on this for years. I just want you to understand what you are risking.”

Stiles watched her leave. “I do love you.”

“I know you do,” she replied. At the top of the stairs, before she would leave his laboratory, she stopped. “Your error with the spiritual transference is easily corrected, I think. This is magic, but it is also physics. Your problem is proximity; you’re using too much energy reaching out to grab the spirit.”

Stiles scrunched up his face. “Liam needs to be here.”

She nodded, confidently. “Liam needs to be here. Think hard, Stiles, and don’t be too late.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He saw the ghost of Jennifer Blake in the passenger's seat. 
> 
> “Jennifer, you’ve been dead for so long, yet you are still crazy. What do you mean my debut?”
> 
> “Stiles, come on now. Tonight’s the first time you step into the big leagues. Tonight’s the first time your actions will harm an innocent. If you can count Liam as an innocent, but I am sure that you do.”
> 
> Stiles nearly swerved off the road. “I’m not harming an innocent.”

Stiles looked down on Lydia, asleep on their bed. He watched her chest rise and fall in the gentle, ceaseless rhythm of sleep. He placed a hand upon her abdomen. The child was far too young for anyone without skill to feel it but he had become so sensitive to the pulse of life that he could sense the child flickering on the edge of his awareness. 

His child. The world flashed back and forth, tremulous with new possibilities. His child.

Lydia would be out for hours, he knew. The draught he had slipped her would make sure of that. No matter the outcome of tonight’s action, she would not have to be part of it. The herbal concoction he had given her would dull not only her normal senses but also her banshee’s hearing; it had the added benefit of not having any potential harm for the child at all.

Stiles moved out of the bedroom, shutting the door softly behind him. He paused outside it, his hand resting on the door. He was doing that a lot tonight. Pausing. 

“Now?” He asked himself. “Tonight is the night. Five years of work. Five years. And suddenly you are getting cold feet?”

As usual, there was a ghost waiting for him at the top of the stairs. The rest were down in the yard, he supposed. “Well, after tonight, at least you won’t be bothering me,” he told it. “Not as a ghost, anyway.”

“You’re getting cold feet because you know this is wrong,” replied the ghost. 

“Why do you think that line of argument is going to work on me now when it hasn’t worked in the past?” He scoffed and pushed past it to go down the stairs. “One would think you didn’t want to come back.”

“It’s not about what I want, and you know it. You’ve seen the worst of how life works; now you get to see the best.” The ghost was following him downstairs.

“Will you go away if I don’t do this?” He demanded. “Will you stop bothering me?”

“No.” It was the only answer it could give. They would never go away.

Stiles gave an exasperated gesture. “There you go. I know what’s going on. It feels like the world is tempting me to back off. It is saying See? See? Here are compensations for your loss.” He got his bag from the study as the ghost followed him around. “But the point is that they’re distractions – though very cool distractions, I must admit. But I didn’t need to have this many dead people in my life to earn Lydia’s love. I didn’t need to have this much blood my hands to have a son or daughter.” 

He hefted the bag with more force than he needed. “I really feel like I have to keep repeating myself time and time again. I know this is wrong. I am the bad guy here. And speaking of which ...”

Stiles pulled out his phone and hit a contact number. He wouldn’t look the ghost in the eye as he waited for the other side to pick up. 

Liam did indeed pick up. On the other end of the line, it sounded like the alpha was enjoying a lazy night at home. “Hey, Stiles. What’s up?”

“You have some time tonight? There’s something I need you to see with me.” None of what he said was a lie. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” That was also not a lie.

“No. Just doing some homework. I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs for a while. Want me to get the others?” 

“No, that’s not necessary. I think that the two of us will be able to resolve this just fine. I can pick you up in about fifteen? If that’s okay with you?” 

“Sure. See you then.” Liam hung up.

Stiles wondered when it became so easy for him to betray those people he called friends. He turned to the ghost that had followed him down the stairs and the others that had gathered around him as he left the house and said: “Don’t answer that. Donovan doesn’t count.”

He wondered why he had brought him, of all people, up now. Was he worried that this was an attempt to make up for senior year? That seemed rather trite. Or was he afraid that now, at the edge, one of the ghosts he feared most would make its play to try to stop him. Would the chimera be waiting in the passenger’s seat of his car for the ride to Liam’s?

It turned out not to be Donovan; who was sitting in the seat was far more surprising. “Okay. What happened? Did you draw the short straw?” 

Jennifer Blake looked at him with the same mixture of interest and contempt she had for him in English class. “I think you can figure out why it’s me, Stiles, if you put your mind to it.”

Stiles pulled out and drove down the road. “You know, since your very presence makes me uncomfortable, I’ll think I’ll pass and try to ignore you. It’s worked for me pretty well so far, so why change now?”

“Has it really worked well for you so far? For the last seven years, when have things actually gone away if you’ve ignored them long enough? Come on. This is the big night; your debut, as it were. Shouldn’t you be more serious? Shouldn’t you thrill to the power you now possess?”

“Jennifer, you’ve been dead for so long, yet you are still crazy. What do you mean my debut?”

“Stiles, come on now. Tonight’s the first time you step into the big leagues. Tonight’s the first time your actions will harm an innocent. If you can count Liam as an innocent, but I am sure that you do.”

Stiles nearly swerved off the road. “I’m not harming an innocent.” 

“No? What would it feel like if someone came and took the power you have struggled so hard to accumulate? Someone you trusted snatched it up for their own purposes? You know all the effort that Liam has made to learn control. You know all the effort Liam has made to learn how to be a good Alpha. You know all the effort Liam has made to live up to the reputation of his predecessor. You are going to take that from him. If that’s not harm …”

“He’ll get something in return. You can’t tell me he doesn’t want, in his heart, what I am going to do.”

“Perhaps.” She gave him that sultry little smirk that she always employed when she had people on the ropes. “Or perhaps your spell will go awry, and he’ll die. It’s possible. Bell died. Dudek died.”

“They were imperfect runs. That’s why I chose them; they were scum who deserved to die. I learned from them. I’ve learned from everything I’ve done. It will work perfectly.”

“Are you sure about that?” Her smirk was even sharper. “You’ve never even managed spiritual transference in any significant amount. You have no idea what it will mean if you fail with that transference. And if you were totally and completely confident in your ability – why did you drug Lydia?” 

“It’s good my mental health is so generous, giving dead villains the chance to needle me one more time.” Stiles groused, but he knew he couldn’t shut her up. Because he knew that this wasn’t actually Jennifer Blake sitting in his passenger seat and grilling him. It was his own conscience. 

“You drugged your wife because you know, with magic this strong; the slightest misstep could be fatal. You could blow yourself to smithereens. I know that doesn’t bother you, because you don’t consider yourself innocent. But you could also scour the life out of Liam, and you know you could. So, welcome to the big leagues, Stiles.”

“You can be quiet now.” God, his army was getting mouthy. He wished he could go back to the days when they only talked when he wanted them to.

She was quiet for the rest of the trip and vanished when he arrived at Liam’s apartment. Stiles realized with a sort of glum disappointment in himself that he had never gone inside it. He had no idea what it looked like. Liam was his Alpha, and he was Liam’s emissary, but they weren’t really friends. When had that happened? When had he distanced himself from him? Or had he always distanced himself?

“Any idea what it is we’re up against?” Liam asked. The younger man was calm. He wasn’t eager for a fight but he wasn’t scared of them any more either.

“It will be easier just to show you,” replied Stiles. Lying to werewolves had become easy for him. He could cover mistakes with the fact that he was always going to be a little excitable. As a result, when trying to conceal his true motives and feeling from the shifters, he let himself get edgy and excitable. It made excellent cover.

“So,” smiled Liam. “I heard that congratulations are in order. You’re going to be a daddy.”

Stiles’ mouth suddenly was dry. “Seems like it. I’m not sure I’m ready to be one, to be truly honest. I can barely keep up with you kids.”

“For the millionth time, I’m only two years younger than you.” 

They laughed, but to his own ears, Stiles’ laugh sounded forced and hollow. He cursed at himself inwardly. What the hell was the matter with him? Where was his confidence? Where was his surety? This was going to work.

Stiles pushed on with the conversation. “I want you to know something.” He trailed off.

“Yeah?” Liam said in the silence that followed. “There’s usually something that comes after someone saying something like that.”

Stiles keeps driving. “I think that you’ve done a great job as Alpha. I really think you have. And, I know that he would have thought so as well.”

Liam shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “Thanks. What brought this on? You’re not usually one to say things like that.”

“I’m not?” 

“No. Really, and don’t take this wrong, but you aren’t exactly the person who shares things like that.” Liam shrugs. “And now that you’re complimenting me that sounded really rude of me to say.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Stiles couldn’t argue about it. Not tonight.

The pull up to the deserted house which had been the site of all of Stiles’ experimental runs. This next part was going to be tricky. “I’ve been here before, but there are some new developments that you need to see. This house is a locus of the telluric currents – like the Nemeton, but not as governed.”

“Governed.” Liam nodded at the unfamiliar word. “Okay. What else should I expect?”

Stiles opened the door to the house and led him inside. “I don’t think anything I could say would make your prepared. You’re just going to have to witness it for yourself.” They went downstairs to the laboratory. Liam immediately tensed up as he took in the tables, the equipment, and the very feel of the place. 

“This feels like one of their labs.” Liam growled. Stiles didn’t have to think about what he meant by that; Liam would not have very good memories of it. “I thought you got rid of all of them long ago.”

“I did get rid of them. This is something new,” Stiles answered. He went to one of the tables where his equipment was.

“Is that a coffin? Is that a body?” Liam asked, sniffing the air. “It’s so weird. Do you smell …” He looked over at Stiles with amazement and confusion. “Sorry, but that smell is really familiar.” Liam walked towards the body, which was covered with a sheet.

Stiles grabbed what he needed off the table and walked up behind him. “You have nothing to feel sorry about, Liam. As I said, you and I needed to do this together.”

Liam went to the sheet-covered corpse. Stiles couldn’t suppress a shudder; he tried to tell himself that while this was a betrayal, it was also a second chance. Liam would forgive him. 

Liam pulled back the sheet to reveal the corpse of Kaden Dudek. Of course, it didn’t look like Kaden anymore. Liam swore and turned to him. “What the fuck is this!”

Stiles blew the wolfsbane powder in the Alpha’s startled face. Sometimes the old tricks were the best. With a gasp and a frightened, confused look, Liam fell over. 

Stiles looked down at the unconscious werewolf. There was no more time to waffle. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it. He easily lifted Liam’s unconscious body on a third table. He had confirmed Lydia’s intuition – distance mattered as it mattered in any transfer of energy. He should have realized it from what Lydia had been forced to do.

When the two corpses and the unconscious Liam had been arranged properly, linked with the right mystical chains and the right pseudo-scientific equipment, when everything had been checked and recheck and triple checked until Stiles knew he was just stalling, he took his position and drew his mask out of its carrier. When he saw the army of ghosts surrounding him, waiting expectantly, looking at him with pity or with disapproval or with horror or with interest, he swallowed and stood his ground.

“This will work. I swear this will work.”

It didn’t work. 

*******

Liam woke up. He was still in the strange basement. He was lying on a cold metal table. He was dizzy and nauseous and he was as weak as a human, but he could feel that passing. He sat up on the table and shook his head. 

The casket was near him, and he now recognized what the casket was. The body that he had uncovered was covered up again, but he knew what it looked like. It freaked him out. Not as much as it freaked him out that Stiles had attacked him, but he was still, all-in-all totally not okay with this situation.

He looked around trying to clear his head. He realized he wasn’t alone in the room. Sitting at a table over to the side was Stiles. He was in an office chair with his back to him. Liam couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or not, but if he wasn’t, he was staring at a mask, just like the one the Doctors had wore, but made out of wood. 

The thought made Liam fight the urge to throw up.

“I couldn’t do it.” Stiles said suddenly. It was a quiet voice, one with little inflection or emotion. “After everything I’ve done, after everything I said I would do, when it came down to the end, I couldn’t do it. What type of weak-ass villain am I?”

“Stiles?” Liam asked quietly. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t think it wasn’t that I couldn’t kill you, Liam. Don’t think that. I was ready to go that far. At least, I keep telling myself that I was ready to go that far. I was hoping that I didn’t have to kill you to bring him back. I knew it was a possibility, though, no matter how much I wanted to avoid it.”

Liam got to his feet. He still felt a little weak. Stiles wasn’t attacking him again, so maybe he could hear him out.

“I just couldn’t bear the thought, Liam. I couldn’t bear it. Ever since the ghost put it in my head that you might die by me doing this – by my bringing him back – I was worried. I attacked my own belief. After all this _shit_ , I didn’t believe in myself enough. I could feel you slipping away, but it was working.” He slammed his hand on the table. “It _was_ working.”

Liam looked around the room. Now he understood. “You were going to kill me to bring him back.”

“Yes.” He said it heavily. “It was the damn spark. The damn alpha spark. I had waited too long. Far too goddamn long to bring him back without killing anyone. Peter waited for under a month; he didn’t have to take the spark from Derek. But with you and him, it’s been five years. I’d have to rip the whole thing out of you. You wouldn’t have survived that.”

Liam walked over to him. “You’ve been doing this for that long? Why …” He stopped. He knew why he hadn’t told anyone. “I didn’t think you missed him that much. You never talked about him.”

“You understand, don’t you? How wrong it is for him to be gone and you still to be here? I had to make it right, but then, as I was this close to ripping your life out of you, I realized that it wouldn’t make it right.” He still didn’t look at Liam. “There were two scenarios.”

Stiles raised up his right pointer finger. “First scenario. I brought him back, but he couldn’t deal with the fact that I had killed people to bring him back. Someone like me wouldn’t care, but he would. Wouldn’t he?”

“He would have,” Liam agreed. He realized that Stiles was waiting to see if he was going to attack him. He wasn’t. 

“So, I’d bring him back to a life poisoned by the knowledge that I killed you to bring him back. That I’d killed the bastards that killed him to do it. You don’t recognize Kaden Dudek, do you? You wouldn’t.” Stiles laughed grimly. “I wouldn’t care what he thought of me.” He paused. “That’s a lie, I would care, but I could live with it. But I imagined what would happen if he couldn’t deal with the fact that his life came at your expense; the hell his new life would be.”

“Scenario two.” Stiles put up a second finger. “I brought him back, and he didn’t care about how many people I’d killed to bring him back.” 

“Then it wouldn’t be him.”

“Correct. And I’d have to live with the horror of what I’d done, like the mad scientist in those old B-Movies.” Stiles kept looking at the mask. “So, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make it work. Five years of planning, of scheming, of learning – and I chickened out at the last moment.”

Liam knew he should be angry or frightened, but he wasn’t. Stiles sounded so broken. 

“What do you want to do, Liam? I won’t fight you.”

Liam took a deep breath. “Okay. Stiles, do you think I wouldn’t have done the same thing if I hadn’t thought of it? You think I didn’t want him back? You think we all didn’t want him back? But we didn’t think about it. And I don’t want to die, of course, but I can’t blame you for trying. “ He took a deep breath. “You are my emissary. What do you think I should do?”

Stiles turned around and looked at him. He looked really calm, but it was the calm of a strong man facing firing squad. “I have no fucking clue.”

Liam looked around the room. “Tomorrow, we will put the coffin back where it came from. We’ll get rid of that thing.” He put both hands on Stiles shoulders. “Swear to me that you’re done.”

Stiles laughed bitterly. “I’m done. You can’t imagine how much I’m finished.” 

“Then drive me home. We’ll talk after we all get some sleep.” Liam understood, he thought, what had happened here. Not the complexities of the magic; not the ethical dimensions. Someone had missed someone else so much, they were willing to break the rules. He understood that. “And I want you to see someone; someone professional. And, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a ride home?”

Stiles looked at him with a mixture of hopelessness and terrible mirth. “Sure.”

******

The drive had been silent. When he had dropped of Liam, the Alpha had said. “We’ll get through this.” Stiles had nodded dumbly, and it didn’t even occur to him how much like … how much like someone else he had sounded.

He parked the car in front of his house and got out. He had not taken two steps when the army appeared, pouring out from the eaves of the forest, rushing up the sides of the road, emerging from behind the house. All of the army, each and everyone in their places. They were going to escort him to the rest of his life. In the end, the army had emerged victorious.

He walked toward the front of the house. Each step he took was watched by the ghosts who crowded in. They were waiting for acknowledgement. 

“So, this is how it is going to be,” he said to them. “Forever and ever.”

“Only until it is your turn to join the Army of Ghosts,” said the ghost at their head, standing at the doorway to his house. “It’s not that long, you know. You’ll barely know that we’re here.”

“Liar.” He came up to the front door and opened it with the key. “I’ll always know that you’re here.”

Stiles opened the door to the house and paused before heading in. “Good night, Scott.”

“Good night, Stiles.”

Stiles stepped inside the house and turned off the porch light. All was darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, the ending was a little bleaker than I imagined. I could imagine Stiles being ruthless and violent toward those who had hurt him, but not those who were innocent. Stiles has a dark side, but I couldn't push that far. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.


End file.
